Mod History

By Frank Rich

QUADROPHENIA

Directed by Franc Roddam Screenplay by Dave Humphries, Martin Stellman and Franc Roddam

If you are in the right place at the right time, you can almost hear history shift its gears. Such was the extraordinary phenomenon that occurred in the England of the early 1960s. Working-class kids, inspired by the new British rock, came together to create a new culture. As if by spontaneous combustion, that culture quickly spread beyond England's meaner streets and pubs to the entire world; eventually it defined a generation. To be in the country where the excitement began was to see life in fast motion.

Quadrophenia is a resourceful and frequently successful attempt to recapture the feelings, textures and chaos of that period. Unfortunately, the film is saddled with a title that belies its ambitions.

Though produced by the rock group The Who and named after one of their albums, Quadrophenia is not a concert film. The band members do not appear in the movie as performers but turn up only in the background score and occasional still photographs. Rather than make a safe companion piece to the film version of Tommy, The Who have daringly cross-fertilized American Graffiti with Look Back in Anger.

Like John Osborne's Angry Young Man of the '50s, the hero of Quadrophenia is named Jimmy. Estranged from his family and bored with his London mailroom job, he has become a member of the mods, a loose, nationwide gang of motorbike dandies that sprang up with the Mersey sound. As the talented director Franc Roddam follows Jimmy and his cronies around, we watch a society being born. When The Who's pivotal song. My Generation, flips on at a boozy make-out party, the kids forsake their '50s dance steps for the tribal free-for-all that would typify the '60s. When the mods brawl noisily with their rivals, the blue-collar rockers, a malevolent conflict becomes a liberating, if vandalistic rock riot. Roddam understands that the passions of the time were essentially benign.

The director does not always record Jimmy's personal adventures with the same grit and humor that he brings to the film's social canvas. The hero has too many stereotypical conflicts with his overly villainous parents and employers; there are too many scenes that try to convey his sensitivity by showing him brooding on the beach at Brighton. The film's final section, a long chain of cathartic crises, is contrived. Still, Phil Daniels, as Jimmy, is both appealingly quirky and a good double for Who Guitarist Pete Townshend. Daniels also has two funny and touching sex scenes. When Jimmy masturbates solemnly at home and later makes inexperienced love to a prized "bird" (Leslie Ash), the film persuasively demonstrates that even the revolutions of the '60s did not overturn the crucial rituals of postadolescence. In those moments, Quadrophenia offers not only historical drama but also the kind of human drama that is timeless. --Frank Rich

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