REVIEW: American: The Bill Hicks Story

American: The Bill Hicks Story
Directed by: Matt Harlock, Paul Thomas
(Madman)
(out of 5)

“I don’t like anything in the mainstream and they don’t like me” - Bill Hicks.

As I watched this truly impressive and comprehensive biographical appreciation of social thinker and comedian Bill Hicks, my subconscious reverberated with Hulk Hogan’s entrance music, ‘I Am A Real American’, an association no doubt triggered by Hicks’ own take on being a patriotic American: defiant towards those in authority and critical of mediocrity and the unthinking acceptance of social controls, seeing how even popular culture attempts to organise and control - to question.

But that Hogan image, with all that invigorating patriotism and mass involvement, is very persuasive. Essentially telling Hicks’ entire life story, from his birth to his death from cancer in 1992, directors Harlock and Thomas do a fine job, letting the story be told by just 10 people who knew him best and without celebrity involvement - so there’s a humanism to it all. With a heavy family involvement, his early days are documented well. Hicks’ ideas are discussed and you get a fairly intimate picture of the man.

There’s a slew of on stage performances from his substance fuelled early days, to the thoughtful and intense diatribes on whatever pissed him off. He wasn’t from the ‘what’s up with that?’ school of everyday comedy - more a combative engagement with things and ideas, a conversational style of mounting anger and despair. Sometimes he became misanthropic as the anger takes him, like his, “Hitler had the right idea, he was just an underachiever” line, and other such flights of rancour featured on this disc.

An animation feature that enhances the many still pictures and links the interviews and archive footage could have become intrusive, but in fact adds to the organic feel and keeps the story flowing. Hicks was always political, in the same way George Carlin and Richard Pryor were - subversive because they had to be, both of them proud Americans. T

he title suggests a total political onslaught, but is more about an individual striving to understand what the fuck is going on. This comes out in his pugnacious comedic assaults. Certainly one for the fans with its hours of extras, but if you haven’t heard of Mr Bill Hicks, this will enlighten and entertain nonetheless.

American: The Bill Hicks Story Trailer

By Kerry Buchanan