You're Gonna Miss Me: A Film About Roky Erickson

[cutout]

I finally moved this to the top of my Netflix queue and was really impressed/moved/spooked out by it. Great documentary.

[andrew in philadelphia]

awesome. stupid me has been meaning to see this for some time but keeps getting sidetracked. i was blessed with the chance to see him in manhattan this past spring and it was one of the most amazing things i've ever seen/heard in my life.

[Denim Gremlin]

I love Roky more than anything, but i kind of had the opposite reaction.

I found parts of it really interesting but I went into it expecting a portrait of the life of a troubled genius and I felt like I get a documentary about his mother.

also I was really underwhelmed by the production value of the film. It looked cheap and the few people they actually got to talk about Roky just seemed random. I don't care what the guy from zz top or the guy from mtv have to say about him and what they did have to say was boring and not much of a revelation.

I did really like when they actually showed the world he lived in now but it seemed like it would have worked better as a bookend to what should have been a more comprehensive study of his life.

and I agree with andrew seeing him live is an indescribable experience.

[daveB from Oakland]

The jaw-dropping part of this movie came at the very end, when somebody handed him a guitar and he sang a song. I had watched the whole movie thinking he had pretty much lost all functionality at every level ... and then he starts singing and it's as if somebody had started playing a record of him in 1968. His voice sounded amazing. Totally unreal.

[John Junk 2.0]

The DVD experience of this movie is pretty weird.  It ends with him in his weird brother's weirdly clean house.  Then you go to the extras and you see the ways his brother has helped him get on his feet and out playing again and on some medication. You feel positive!  Then there's the next update on him and it's a trial giving him control of his own life and confirming that he's off medication.  Which is good, except that in this update to my eyes he didn't look much more together then he did when he was living with his mother and not taking medication.  It's also weird that his brother was advocating for medication so much, then had some suspect psychological guru with him pontificating about how schizophrenia doesn't exist in the second update. 

The craziest part of the movie, for me, was watching the brother go through therapy to deal with his father issues, then finding out that his father literally lives next fucking door to him.

[samir]

I saw this at SXSW a few years ago and Roky himself was there. (Not braggin') Found the flick pretty sad with all the electroshock therapy and troubled childhood stuff, but as someone else said, seeing him play a song at the end was a goosebumps moment.

[Jonathan Steven]

The DVD experience of this movie is pretty weird.  It ends with him in his weird brother's weirdly clean house.  Then you go to the extras and you see the ways his brother has helped him get on his feet and out playing again and on some medication. You feel positive!  Then there's the next update on him and it's a trial giving him control of his own life and confirming that he's off medication.  Which is good, except that in this update to my eyes he didn't look much more together then he did when he was living with his mother and not taking medication.  It's also weird that his brother was advocating for medication so much, then had some suspect psychological guru with him pontificating about how schizophrenia doesn't exist in the second update. 

The craziest part of the movie, for me, was watching the brother go through therapy to deal with his father issues, then finding out that his father literally lives next fucking door to him.

I also found it quite weird that within every update that brother had a new stupid haircut and get-up.  First he had some comb-over, then he had a shaved head, then he had like 2 foot long braided dreads and a tracksuit, quite odd.

[daveB from Oakland]

The DVD experience of this movie is pretty weird.  It ends with him in his weird brother's weirdly clean house.  Then you go to the extras and you see the ways his brother has helped him get on his feet and out playing again and on some medication. You feel positive!  Then there's the next update on him and it's a trial giving him control of his own life and confirming that he's off medication.  Which is good, except that in this update to my eyes he didn't look much more together then he did when he was living with his mother and not taking medication.  It's also weird that his brother was advocating for medication so much, then had some suspect psychological guru with him pontificating about how schizophrenia doesn't exist in the second update. 

The craziest part of the movie, for me, was watching the brother go through therapy to deal with his father issues, then finding out that his father literally lives next fucking door to him.

Yeah, I was trying to remember which of those parts were in the movie, and which were in the DVD updates. Up until that very last update, I basically felt like the brother was the white-hat good guy in the movie. But then he found that guru and it sounded like he wanted to discontinue Roky's meds. And I was just saying to myself no, no , NOOOO, don't do that! Stick with the program! I know that we live in a society where psychiatrists overprescribe that stuff ... but Roky definitely seems like the kind of guy for whom the meds are genuinely helpful.