Glass Candy: "Digital Versicolor"

Tom Hardy: he certainly is, isn’t he. His star-making performance in Bronson: The Man The Myth The Celebrity is attracting some kinetic adjectives alright, but with a temper like the one he can demonstrate on screen, you’d want to keep the man sweet, too. If you haven’t seen the film, Hardy’s successfully rolled out every nuance of “Britain’s most dangerous prisoner” into one long and very statically-charged red carpet—one that leads straight into a cage in a basement in a prison, where sociopaths work in the cloakroom. A bloke I work with used to lock the real Bronson in many moons ago, and described looking into the villain’s eyes every night as “like looking at a Rottweiler from a low tree—you’re never quite sure if it could jump up and get you.” Director Nicholas Winding Refn has a similar insight, and his biopic of the big villain’s “rise” through the ’80s has the right level of cocaine pizzazz to keep you on edge for more. With lashings of New Order and Pet Shop Boys all round (plus some rampant glee from the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra), the film’s soundtrack gleams like Knight Rider, merrily complemented by Refn’s slick camera angles as he matches his subject for energy. And you need a lot of kicks and ranting to stay locked up as long as this one, believe me.

“Digital Versicolor” is probably the film’s overall theme—stark as Hardy’s strongman moustache, pumping like convicted killers after a night spent benching pig iron. When “Versicolor” first went public on Glass Candy’s B/E/A/T/B/O/X LP two years ago, no-one really went nuts for it. It plodded; it sparkled; it lit up; it faded. It still does, obviously, but set to Refn’s machiavellian storytelling and a rabid, floodlit Hardy, it delivers its message with a snap. “This is white, white, white / This is orange, orange orange…” coos vocalist Ida No in falsetto, talking us through some rainbow paint schemes while the movie fills slowly with red—maybe red on black at a pinch; cool as the swoosh on the A-Team van and growling like B. A. Baracus. Johnny Jewel’s ominous keys jabber for more than three minutes straight until his Casios burst into life: not quite as hardy as The Man/The Myth/The Celebrity, but just right for the sequence where one very puffed-up wannabe slathers lard on himself before fighting. It’s ironic the film needs the reaches of Europe to show us the tics of this truly warped Englishman, but if you can think of a more British image than a hulking man in batter beating fuck out of everything with nobs on, then trust me, you really need to emigrate.