It begins like a bristling Brit gangster thriller, with sadistic enforcer Chas (James Fox) fleeing from vengeful hoods to the Notting Hill hideout of Turner (Mick Jagger), a jaded rock star. Jealously eyeing Chas' brutal potency, Turner decides to turn his stay into a drug-addled headfuck. And it's here that co-directors Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg go fully auteurmatic, dissolving the layers between fantasy and reality until they clash like cymbals.
Fuelled by Cammell's whacked-out erudition and lensed with tyro brilliance by Roeg, this hallucinogenic deconstruction of identity writhes with sex, substances, ultraviolence and good ol' rock'n'roll. And hell, the story behind the camera was even trippier... A startling '60s synthesis.
