Ronnie Wood might just be one of the luckiest guys around. In the late 60s, he played bass with the Jeff Beck Group. When Beck turned down Woodstock and the group folded, Wood and singer Rod Stewart joined up with former Small Faces Ronnie Lane, Kenney Jones, and Ian McLagan to create the all-new Faces. Then he got the nod to replace Mick Taylor in the Rolling Stones, where he’s been ever since. Three marriages, drugs, alcohol, and an addiction to cigarettes would have killed a lesser man. But an operation on a sober Wood, still with the Stones after 45 years, cleared his lungs as if he’d never smoked. The Ronnie Wood documentary Somebody Up There Likes Me clearly lives up to its name.
Directed by Mike Figgis, who’s been behind a number of movies and television programs including 1995’s Leaving Las Vegas, the film essentially hands the reigns to Wood, who spends a good portion of the time telling his own story and filling in the blanks. In several sequences, Figgis is heard and seen, asking questions as he steers through surreal, choppy footage that often strays from a linear narrative. Elsewhere, Wood is seen painting and drawing, conversing at length with renowned British artist Damien Hirst, and talking about his bad habits of the past. Led Zeppelin manager Peter Grant, who represented the Jeff Beck Group for a spell, being interviewed doesn’t little to move the film forward. The highlights may well be the testimonials from fellow Rolling Stones Mick Jagger, Charlie Watts, and Keith Richards, Jeff Beck Group and Faces mate Ron Stewart (but no Jeff Beck), singer and Wood collaborator Imelda May, and wife Sally Wood.
Despite some glaring holes — acknowledging The First Barbarians (Wood’s 1974 hodge-podge one-off with Keith Richards) with barely a word about The New Barbarians (Wood and Richards’ revival of the First Barbarians who did a six-week tour in 1979), and little mention of Wood’s seven-album solo career — Somebody Up There Likes Me paints a vivid and aspiring portrait of Ronnie Wood, warts and all. The DVD and Blu-ray disc are enhanced with bonus performances from the Tivoli Theatre in Wimborne, England, plus additional in-studio clips. Wood’s luck as a musician, artist, and family man is certainly nothing he takes for granted; that he’s survived all the trials and tragedies that come with the success is really what drives the point of his life home.
~ Shawn Perry
