“Refreshingly self-aware”: Boy George & Culture Club review

Admittedly, despite having grown up with the chart-topping pop band Culture Club a ubiquitous presence on the airwaves of my youth, I’m not the target nostalgia audience for Alison Ellwood’s Boy George & Culture Club, a film whose subject is apparent to anyone familiar with such prefabricated 80s tunes as “Karma Chameleon” and “Miss Me Blind.” Indeed, for likeminded new wave aficionados, the band’s tired mainstream sound always undercut any rebellious bonafides its theatrically-clad titular singer may have had. (Music snob queer kids much preferred the gender-bending vocals of Bronski Beat’s Jimmy Somerville and Yaz’s Alison Moyet.) Which is why it felt so refreshingly self-aware to hear George himself candidly stress from the start, “We were never cool.” (This after noting that the aforementioned 1983 hit “Karma Chameleon” was supposedly the “nail in our cool coffin.”)

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