Swaddled in an adult diaper and wearing a crown of thorns, DJ Frankie Wilde slides down into a frenzied club. It’s as galling a sight as it is ecstatic.
Played with impressive mania by Paul Kaye, Frankie Wilde descends on Ibiza’s Manumission (reportedly the world’s largest club) to grant its masses salvation by way of kicking mixes of melody, bass and noise.
Canadian writer-director Michael Dowse has made an emotionally amped film about a real DJ whose world came crashing down about his ears when he lost his hearing.
“It’s All Gone Pete Tong” doesn’t waste footage on Wilde’s ascent from Brixton boy to life as a hyped (overhyped?) DJ living the life on the posh Spanish island. Instead, Dowse begins with Wilde’s apex and plummet.
A man with an insatiable appetite for adulation and drugs, Wilde also has a boundless gift for the beat.
This is biopic as raving rumination. But it is also a surprisingly compassionate redemption story. No one knows what happened to the real Frankie Wilde. Rumors have him either spinning mixes underground or just plain 6 feet under.
Dowse has no qualms about imagining a bold legend for the disappeared mixmaster, one that takes to task the ’90s party scene even as it finds pleasure in the musicmaking.
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Not surprisingly, the characters who surround Wilde are of the “with friends like this” variety. He marries supermodel Sonya Slowinski (Kate Magowan), but their son is clearly not his. And when Sonya shouts her promise to stay no matter what, the breaking of that vow seems a matter of time.
The most venal character may be Wilde’s manager, Max (Mike Wilmot). He effuses the frenetic love that in the midst of a wild ride appears so unconditional. In reality, it’s a spider’s web of strings.
Wilde is no prize, either. An interview he does with a music journalist early in the film could have benefited from an interpreter. But it’s not because his accent is heavy. It’s just his brain babbling on drugs.
Throughout his decline, Wilde is visited by a hulking creature in an apron. This big badger represents his drug habit.
This is one of the filmmaker’s dips into a zesty playfulness. Dowse also does engaging work with image and sound as Wilde loses his hearing completely and then slowly gets back to bass and rhythm with the help of Penelope (Beatriz Batarda).
Constructed as a faux documentary, “It’s All Gone Pete Tong” uses a number of talking-head interviews about Frankie Wilde. Some of them are real world-class DJs, including the film’s executive producer, Pete Tong. Eric Banning, who has written two biographies about Wilde, also appears.
In keeping with the prerogatives of the DJ, “It’s All Gone Pete Tong” aggressively mixes the real and the imagined.
Oddly, the film is more of a revelation if severed from the true story it is based on.
Yet it’s a more tender endeavor for granting a real human a cinematic exit full of grace.
“It’s All Gone Pete Tong”
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R for pervasive drug and alcohol abuse, language and some sexual content/nudity|1 hour, 30 minutes|DRAMA| Written and directed by Michael Dowse; photography by Balasz Bolygo; starring Paul Kaye, Kate Magowan, Beatriz Batarda, Mike Wilmot, Dave Lawrence, Paul J. Spence |Opens today at the Mayan.
