This weirdly peevish and listless documentary defeated my attempts to like it: it’s about Joe Corré, the son of Vivienne Westwood and the late Malcolm McLaren, and the way he publicly burned – back in 2016 – a huge trove of punk memorabilia in his possession said to be worth £5m. Was it really worth £5m? Maybe. And why did Corré torch all this stuff? Was it a protest against the way the punk spirit has been sold out to corporate culture? Or was it Corré’s cry of psychological pain at being cut out of his father’s will, as the film comes close to hinting? Again: maybe.
The other question is, who cares? Eventually the burning was sold to the public as a kind of climate-emergency protest. That is something we can get all get behind, but young people today will understandably be impatient or indifferent about the necrophiliac issue of whether or not “punk” should “wake up”.
