‘The Blue Star’: a forgotten rocker in search of a lost truth | Culture

In a world surrendered to the cult of fame, The blue star It invokes the light projected by secondary roads, far from the dominant idea of ​​success that prevails today. For that reason alone, the feature debut of Javier Macipe It is a discovery against the current of a genre as thriving in the audiovisual field as biopic, engrossed in squeezing every last drop of life out of cultural figures, especially musicians. We know episodes of their biographies through series, fiction and documentaries, and great film productions that also add to the fashion, generally stuffy and hagiographic, that puts Bob Marley, Leonard Bernstein or Aretha Franklin in the same bag. .

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 It imposes itself as a happy rarity, a fiction with traces of a documentary based on the adventure of a musician known especially in the Aragonese circuits and whose short life becomes the center of a film that, despite its 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 Bet on rock’n’roll.

The blue star It 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 Carabajal, 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.

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, only to later open up to road movie naturalist that evokes the Argentine trip of Mauricio Aznar. Both registries function largely thanks to the work by the actor Pepe Lorente, that brings the ill-fated rocker to life, 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 final step 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.

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