'The Blue Star': a forgotten rocker in search of a lost truth

In a world surrendered to the cult of fame,

The Blue Star

invokes the light projected by secondary roads, far from the dominant idea of ​​success that prevails today.

For that reason alone, Javier Macipe's feature film debut is a discovery against the current of a genre as thriving in the audiovisual field as the

biopic,

immersed in squeezing every last drop of life out of cultural figures, especially musicians.

We know episodes of his biographies through series, fiction and documentaries, and great film productions that also add to the fashion, generally stuffy and hagiographic, that lumps Bob Marley, Leonard Bernstein or Aretha Franklin.

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Faced with this bubble that has not just burst—just a few days ago four films directed by Sam Mendes about the four members of The Beatles were announced—the modest

The Blue Star

stands out as a happy rarity, a fiction with traces of a documentary based on the adventure of a musician known especially on the Aragonese circuits and whose short life becomes the center of a film that, despite his arrhythmias, is exciting.

The story is that of the poet and rocker Mauricio Aznar, born in 1964 and died in 2000, who led several groups (Golden Zippers, Más Birras and Almagato) and whose greatest commercial success was that Héroes del Silencio made a version of his song Apuesta

por rock'n'roll.

Pepe Lorente, as Mauricio Aznar in 'The Blue Star'.

The Blue Star

is the story of a musician burdened by his heroin addiction who in the nineties decided to find himself in Latin American folklore.

An admirer of the Argentine Atahualpa Yupanqui since he was a child, Aznar traveled to Argentina in 1993 to overcome his existential and musical crisis.

There he discovered the chacarera and Los Carbajal, a family of musicians (“Chacarera of the soul / give me tenderness and song / to lull my dreams / with maternal charm,” says one of their songs) who gave him back the truth that he so needed at the time.

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Macipe's film is built like a braid in which fiction passes through document and document through fiction, creating a path in which cinema and life will end up meeting.

The director and screenwriter, who has taken ten years to finish a project that has gone through all kinds of obstacles, transports us with a few strokes to the life of a provincial city in the last decade of the 20th century, to the gambling dens and streets that steps on a character immersed in a fatal vicious circle, to then open up to the naturalistic

road movie

that evokes Mauricio Aznar's Argentine trip.

Both records work largely thanks to the work of actor Pepe Lorente, who brings the ill-fated rocker to life by transmitting his lights and shadows, but without underlining either of the two, only very subtly reflecting the mixture of hopelessness and enthusiasm that marked the passage. end of his life.

Lorente also functions as a bridge between fiction and document, between past and present.

The film does not sweeten the story, although it does pamper its music, recorded without fear of live performance, until resurrecting, at times movingly, Mauricio Aznar's return trip.

The blue star

Director:

Javier Macipe.

Performers:

Pepe Lorente, Cuti Carabajal, Bruna Cusí, Marc Rodríguez, Catalina Sopelana.

Genre:

biopic

.

Spain, 2023.

Duration:

129 minutes. 

Premiere: February 23.

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