YOU'RE GONNA MISS ME
Keven McAlester
USA, 2005, 88 minutes
In 1966, Roger "Roky" Erickson was a rock star. No fooling around. A tall, beautiful 19-year old, Roky fronted the band The Thirteenth Floor Elevators and had a Billboard Magazine smash hit with "You're Gonna Miss Me." The Thirteenth Floor Elevators coined the phrase psychedelic rock and helped launch the genre. Roky's charismatic stage presence and ability to effortlessly write intelligent and melodious pop songs make his descent into incapacitating mental illness a rock & roll tragedy.
The film YOU'RE GONNA MISS ME finds the present day Roky a disheveled mess, living in squalor in a tiny suburb near Austin and suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. His overprotective mother, who is his only guardian, eschews western medication and prefers to keep her son in a constant state of dependency on herself. Roky's brothers argue with their mother about how to treat him, and the youngest brother even petitions the court for sole guardianship.
Documentaries about dysfunctional families have almost become their own genre of late, which makes the freshness of this film all the more satisfying. YOU'RE GONNA MISS ME succeeds far beyond titillating the audience with the story of a celebrity's fall from greatness. It's a stirring portrait of the devastation of mental illness, a "where are they now" biopic replete with sex, drugs and rock & roll and a family drama of Shakespearean proportions.
Colin Stanfield
Kevin McAlester lives in Los Angeles. This is his first film.
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