GFF 2021: Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché

“It’s plastic, disposable. That’s what pop stars are all meant to be,” Marianne Joan Elliott-Said – aka Poly Styrene – says shyly. It’s the mid-1970s and her punk band X-Ray Spex is just taking off, her adopted moniker splashed all over the music world. Her words are oddly prescient in our post-Perez Hilton world, yet Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché – co-directed by the singer’s daughter Celeste Bell and released ten years after her death – is a gorgeous act of protest against this systemic disposability, a determined effort to chronicle the remarkable achievements of a sadly too-short life. 

Bringing together archival footage, extracts from Poly Styrene’s own diaries and voiceover interviews – Vivienne Westwood and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore among them – Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché does not so much tread the line between the personal and the political as collapse its boundaries. Staying true to punk’s anti-establishment roots, the documentary weaves through the singer’s life, spotlighting the politics of being mixed race and Somali during the birth of the National Front, and unpicking her fraught, dystopian relationship with consumerism.

“I had an innate desire to be free,” Poly Styrene explains, and the film not only explores the shackles of capitalism, fame, and gender that bound her, but lovingly depicts the ways in which she at times escaped them through lyrics and joyful performance set again abortion marches and psychological illness. A collective act of grief and celebration, Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché is a moving portrait of an extraordinary artist.

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Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché has its world premiere at Glasgow Film Festival, screening 27 Feb to 2 Mar
Released in the UK 5 Mar by Modern Films