In the soundtrack to my life, The Clash plays nonstop from ages 14 to 18. I learned how to use a turntable so I could play my dad’s Clash records and I spent many an afternoon jumping around my living room to London Calling. I had always halfway figured that I would get the chance to see them reunite, so when frontman Joe Strummer suddenly and unexpectedly died of a heart condition in 2002, I was devastated. Despite having been born after The Clash broke up and having no connection to Strummer other than music he made 30 years ago, I felt like I had lost an old friend. The Clash is one of those rare groups to which generations of fans feel a personal connection.

Director Julien Temple attempts to capture that connection in his new documentary about Strummer’s life, The Future Is Unwritten. The film is based around a campfire—Strummer started hosting campfires where friends could share their thoughts and ideas in the last years of his life, and Temple recreates that atmosphere by gathering Strummer’s friends, family, and fans around a fire to remember the musician. Archival footage and animated clips of Strummer’s own art work are interspersed with the interviews, creating a patchwork look at his life from beginning to end.

Temple first stepped into the spotlight with his films about the punk-rock scene in the 1970s, including Number One and The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle, which focused on The Sex Pistols. He was one of the first to film The Clash’s live performances, although his close friendship with Strummer did not develop until many years after the group broke up. He does not set out to teach the audience about Strummer, his music, or his scene, but instead to pay tribute to a friend.

In order to avoid the traps of a conventional documentary, he does not give any background information outside of the interviews, which are themselves almost entirely decontextualized. The names of the interviewees are not provided, nor
is any objective information about their relationship to Strummer, which makes it difficult to keep track of any overarching narrative. Temple understandably tries to put all his interviewees, celebrities or not, on an equal plane, but it is distracting having to wonder who all these people are. His strategy may have even backfired—a few weeks after seeing the film, the only interview I remember concretely is Bono’s, who stirringly reflects on staying up all night with his friends after a Clash concert trying to figure out how to make music that meant as much as what they had just seen.

The film’s lack of structure is disorienting and almost hallucinatory, jumping between unnamed sources and unidentified images, but Strummer’s fans can lose themselves in the music and the love with which The Future is Unwritten is obviously made. Temple’s film is not for those unfamiliar with Strummer and his music, but for the legions of fans who feel the same personal connection to the Clash that I do, it is almost cathartic to watch such a loving homage.