In 1979, at the age of 21, Gary Numan had already charted two number one albums in the UK. He'd scored major hits internationally with "Are 'Friends' Electric?" and "Cars." Following the crest of first wavers, he presented himself as the future: a punk android playing chilly synthetic pop and singing techno-dystopic fictions. The lovechild of Bowie and Kraftwerk, his success was immediate. The media regarded him as a playboy, spending his new fortune on sports cars and planes and splashy homes.
But Steve Read and Rob Alexander's documentary Gary Numan: Android in La La Land finds the achingly human story hiding beneath the robot boy. The film captures a year in the life of the Numan family, as the 55-year-old artist, his wife, and their three daughters move from the English countryside to L.A. and Numan completes his 2013 comeback album Splinter.
Early on, Numan reveals that he has Asperger syndrome. At the height of his popularity, he lived alone in the middle room of a mansion painted completely black, scared to step outside. His parents, who were also his managers, were his only confidantes.
The android persona, he says, was a mask he could wear to feel comfortable in public, especially on stage. The cold affect, however, was more than partly genuine. The film later suggests that his keen interest in machines — synthesizers, cars, airplanes, things he can understand the behaviour of and control — owes something to his disorder.
At the centre of Android in La La Land is the relationship between Numan and his wife Gemma, who functions also as his PA, therapist, make-up artist, and business partner. When he's ineffectual, paralyzed by anxiety, or otherwise nervous — he was diagnosed with clinical depression later in his life — Gemma is decisive and productive. They're a remarkable creative team. "She's everything I'm not," Numan says. And her encouragement and guidance becomes vital to his return-to-basics comeback project.
That part of the film, the comeback, might be cloyingly promotional in tone if the doc weren't arriving three years past its release. But those bits fall into relief, leaving a portrait of a talented late-career artist, coping with his lot, and beginning to feel reinvigorated, both by a new wave of fans recognizing his legacy and by a new pathway in his own work — darker, heavier, and less robotic.
Gary Numan: Android in La La Land is the human portrait behind a famous android by chris hampton | Chart Attack.
