‘Pretenders’ Review: Captures Their Incandescence…and Tragedy

As a rock star, Chrissie Hynde has always been a bit of a paradox — gnarly but cerebral, ferocious yet guarded. And “Pretenders,” Joss Crowley’s sensational and revealing music documentary, shows you that there was a paradox — a glorious one — built into her band.

Formed in London in 1978, the Pretenders emerged from the moment when “punk” had morphed into “new wave.” But there were still musicians around who could claim to be both, and Hynde was one of them. When you listen to “Precious,” which is totally a punk song (it has the potent high-speed sizzle of something by the Ramones), the ice-cold defiance and gutter snarl of Hynde’s singing (“Made me wanna…”), the song’s total fuck-it-all vibe, are undiminished by time. Hynde, with her shag haircut and androgynous toothy scowl, had emerged from the original punk scene (she’d moved to London in her early 20s and even tried to join the Slits), and it left its mark on her. She was a blistering rocker who was going to be no one’s doll.  

And yet…as fierce and defining as a song like “Precious” was, it doesn’t represent what I ultimately cherish about the Pretenders. To say what that is, I have to use a word that risks sounding innocuous: They were tuneful. They came out of the world of rage and nihilism and buzzcuts and heroin, but there was an incandescence to the songs Hynde wrote, and to how the band sounded. For years, rock critics of the post-new wave era struggled to come up with different words to communicate the concept of “jangly guitar.” But it was James Honeyman-Scott, the lead guitarist of the Pretenders, who owned jangly guitar, and in some ways invented it. He had a sound that rang. And Hynde, though she had the feeling of punk in her bones, was the most romantic songwriter of that scene. I don’t mean romantic as in “love songs,” but as in conjuring the majestic romanticism of life. Just listen to “Kid,” a song so happy and sad at the same time that it’s worthy of the Beatles.

“Pretenders,” which is built around astonishing archival footage as well as a lengthy interview with Hynde (Crowley also talks to many fascinating people in her orbit), is a movie that understands that side of the Pretenders — that they were making music so shimmering in its timelessness that it transcended the new-wave aesthetic and a lot of other things. How Chrissie Hynde wound up being that kind of songwriter is anyone’s guess. Songwriting is one of the true mysteries: a gift that drops into certain people from the heavens. But Hynde’s vocal expression was just as magical. She sounded like she was singing directly to you, and she had that unique slow vibrato, which could suffuse a single note with heartbreak.

Born in 1951 and raised in Akron, Ohio, she grew up in what’s described in the film as a “cookie-cutter postwar family.” She loved her parents but experienced their ’50s squareness as if they were aliens. At Kent State University, she was close to one of the four students killed there by the National Guard on May 4, 1970, and by the time she moved to London in the early ’70s, she was ready for anything. Which is what she got.

She was majorly into drugs. She became a pop-music critic for New Musical Express, mostly writing scathing put-downs. But she couldn’t find a band that would have her! She met Mick Jones and attempted to work with him, but he went off and formed the Clash. She tried to join the Damned, but they weren’t biting. (She finally joined a band called the Moors Murders, who were so disreputable that they all performed in masks.) Yet she was writing songs, and her gift was pure; we hear her singing a demo of “Precious” from 1976, and the Hynde mystique is there, fully loaded.

The only solution was to form her own band, which she did, joining forces with a bass player, Pete Farndon (they were in a relationship together), then inviting in James Honeyman-Scott, who turned out to be a karmic addition. Hynde just thought she needed a guitarist, but Honeyman-Scott, who was only 22, was as visionary a guitar player as The Edge. The ferocious drummer Martin Chambers, with his knifey sideburns, completed the quartet.

So here was Hynde, an American girl with a smoldering stare, and her three British male back-up musicians. That sounds like a novelty, but Hynde ruled the stage with such verve, and such effortless punk-ruffian moves, that when you looked at her, you didn’t think that this was pretty much the first time in history that a woman with a guitar slung around her neck had led a rock ‘n’ roll band. She made it look like something that had always been.    

The first song their producer, Nick Lowe, wanted to put out as a single was “Stop Your Sobbing,” Hynde’s cover of a 1964 track by the Kinks. If you listen to the original, it’s got a C&W-meets-British-Invasion stodginess that makes it sound like one of those slightly boring covers that filled out the Beatles’ first few albums. But Hynde makes the song as accusatory, and grandly symphonic, as a great Phil Spector track. In her hands, it’s a brand new song, one that squares with the vantage that would define the Pretenders — a grounded yearning for love, in its very imperfection, to become a higher love. As the single was getting ready to be pressed, the band still didn’t have a name, so Hynde, inspired by the Platters song “The Great Pretender,” came up with it at the last moment.

Here’s another side of the Chrissie Hynde paradox. At 17, she became a vegetarian, and still is, mostly driven by the animal-rights aspect of it all. But as she discusses in the documentary, she also had a thing for bikers — and I don’t just mean that she liked the sexiness of riding on the back of a chopper (though she did). She was hanging out with biker-gang members who were, by her own description, homicidal, and that was part of the excitement. So when it came to her belief in punk danger, this animal-rights vegetarian wasn’t playing.  

That spirit was the yin to her melodic yang. She wrote “Brass in Pocket,” a masterpiece of jangle, and didn’t even want to put it out as a single, though it went to number one and became defining. What lyrics! The song is so resonant that it’s like a movie, and it’s also one of the most romantic songs I’ve ever heard. It could be the anthem of a teenage girl (“‘Cause I’m…gonna make you see,/There’s nobody else here, no one like me”). It could be the anthem of anyone who’s looking for someone to fall for them.

The Pretenders, for a while, had a satisfying life on the road. Hynde was a disciplined performer, and the guys enjoyed the perks of rock celebrity. But they indulged too much. Watching “Pretenders,” we wait for the dark side, and when it arrives it’s simple and devastating. Pete Farndon became a heroin addict, and spiraled down to the point that they had to kick him out of the band. Okay, that happened; it’s part of the rock ‘n’ roll story. He was fired from the Pretenders on June 14, 1982. Exactly two days later, James Honeyman-Scott, who was not a junkie (he was just a rock star who liked to party too much), died in his sleep of a heart attack. He was 25 years old and had been up for four nights straight, doing cocaine. This was a genuinely shocking rock death. Just like that, the band…was no longer a band.

As “Pretenders” captures vividly in the conversation it features with Chrissie Hynde, she’s a straight-shooter who can be extremely prickly and defensive. She was, and still is (at 75, looking great in a black-leather jacket), a strutting rock star who hates to see herself on camera. She smashed through the rock ‘n’ roll glass ceiling before it was even named, yet she doesn’t like the label of feminist, or groundbreaker, or anything else of that ilk, because she doesn’t want to be stuck in the role-model box. She had a fierce bravado on stage, yet claims that she took no pride in her performances; she just thought she was getting away with something. Maybe that’s why she called herself a Pretender? In “Pretenders,” she’s as real as it gets.