Who needs sex and drugs? This rock ’n’ roll doco still compels

THE HARDEST LINE: THE STORY OF MIDNIGHT OIL
M, 110 minutes
In cinemas July 4
★★★★

Paul Clarke’s documentary biopic of Midnight Oil impresses as a powerful antidote to all those rock ‘n’ roll chronicles featuring internecine rivalries, acrimonious break-ups and drug-induced exploits in trashed hotel rooms.

If Peter Garrett’s 2002 decision to leave the band for a political career ignited anger and resentment, we don’t hear about it here. Bones Hillman, the Oils’ bass guitarist, sounds a little forlorn at the suddenness of the band’s dissolution, but that’s it. The consensus is that the time had come.

This doesn’t mean that it’s a dull and anodyne tale. Far from it. For a start, there’s the transformation that occurred when Garrett bounded onto a stage. Here was a well-spoken law graduate who would, in later life, put on a suit and tie and practise the art of political compromise with some success. Yet in his role as the Oils’ lead singer, he became a manic bundle of jerks and twitches as if possessed by an android gone rogue.

Clarke follows the Oils from their beginnings in the 1970s as a surfer band from Sydney’s northern beaches. Friends Rob Hirst and Jim Moginie came up with the idea. Garrett joined them after turning up for an audition and Martin Rotsey followed soon after.

The band’s biographer, Mark Dodshon, says its members fell naturally into different roles with Hirst, the drummer, cast in every sense, as the beating heart of the group. He calls Moginie “the artist in residence” because of his gift for songwriting and phrase-making.

Rotsey, who was endowed with a highly tuned “bullshit detector”, was the glue that held it all together and Garrett, a few years older than the others, brought his pulsing energy to the mix.

Dodshon says the edginess that helped power this momentum lay in the tragedy Garrett had experienced as a teenager when his mother died in a house fire. But whatever the cause, it soon helped sharpen his activist instincts and their influence on the band. They started by rejecting some of the more conventional paths to the top, including the customary appearance on the ABC’s Countdown. Too glitzy, they thought, much to Molly Meldrum’s chagrin, and the record labels remained indifferent until eventually, their perseverance paid off.