No one could argue that rock’n’roll legend Eddie Cochran isn’t worthy of a birth-to-untimely-death bio-doc; it’s almost shocking that this is the first one to be made. But if truth be told, director Kirsty Bell’s effort is stretched so thin to make a feature-length running time you can practically see through the screen. Also it’s so old-fashioned in its structure it plays almost like a tongue-in-cheek parody.
The film deploys just about every scrap of archive material featuring Cochran that the budget could afford (which means we see precious little of his performance in The Girl Can’t Help It), plus scads of rostrum-mounted newspaper articles. That’s still not enough to make more than a long short film, so Bell has inserted endearingly tacky dramatic recreations with actors playing Cochran and his mother, whom the rocker reportedly phoned regularly while on tour. In these performed conversations Cochran confides to mom about, for instance, his fears that he’ll die an early death like his friend Buddy Holly. (And sure enough he did, in 1960 in a car accident on the road between Bristol and Heathrow.)
