Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché

Enchanting contrast: Poly Styrene, the lead singer of the English punk band X-Ray Spex, could scream her lungs out on stage about identity and social injustice: “Oh bondage, up yours!” However, she was disarmingly sweet off stage. “Is she a rebel?” an interviewer asks. She smiles, shyly. Softly she says: “I think so. A little, yes.”

Poly Styrene, who died in 2011, was nothing if not contradictory. An idiosyncratic woman of colour in a white man’s world. The subjects she wrote about were far ahead of her time and she refused to conform to female standards. In this documentary her life’s story is told by her daughter, Celeste Bell. She is critical, yet admiring and loving. Using amazing archival footage of the British 1970’s punk scene and interviews with contemporaries, she and director Paul Sng provide a multifaceted impression of a gentle, hypersensitive icon, the opposite of a cliché.