Filmed mostly during the singer’s protracted dying from AIDS-related illness, Benjamin Smoke is an intentionally fragmented, impressionistic glance at a unique character who philosophizes spontaneously on the role of poetry in his life: “If you can write it down maybe it don’t hurt so much.” Benjamin had a lot of hurt but he wore it lightly on his bony shoulders–along with a single strand of fake pearls.
Born in Atlanta in 1960 he early on thought of himself as “queer,” in the broad sense of different. He did a brief stint in New York as a janitor sweeping up broken glass at the rock club CBGB’s, and spent most of his life in a depressed corner of Atlanta called Cabbagetown where an empty textile mill stands as a monument to the failed dreams of the poor Appalachians who came there looking for a step up. Cohen and Sillen’s camera often slips out the front door of Benjamin’s dilapidated house, where the singer is stretched out on a frayed couch, and into the streets of Cabbagetown where cracked glass lies on the ground far from the downtown chic of CBGB’s.
Interspersed with photo stills from Benjamin’s childhood and Super-8 shots of Smoke performing in small, grungy Atlanta clubs, Benjamin, with his still-youthful mop of hair pointing down to a wide mouth missing some number of teeth, speaks without regret about his life as a singer, speed freak and chain-smoker (“better to smoke here than in the hereafter”). He’s impossible to resist, even if Cohen and Sillen gloss over what surely were the desperate hours Benjamin tempered with his speed and barbiturate cocktails. His idol Patti Smith caught Benjamin’s act not long before he died, leading her to sing of his “mournful energy.”
But don’t be fooled: Benjamin Smoke isn’t Glamor Rock. It’s certainly moving, and it should also be cautionary. Lives screwed up with drugs and drinks, even if they belong to poets, are still screwed up.
