Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 16/5/2013)

Aleksandr Mosin is an enforcer for a 1990s St Petersburg mob boss who exploits his friendship with old Afghan War comrade Mikhail Skryabin to dispose of his victims in one of the three furnaces the shell-shocked major tends in an anonymous corner of the city. As sidekick Yuriy Matveev bundles the bodies of a swindling businessman and a knife killer into the flames, Mosin sits on Skryabin's bed in his cramped quarters and explains that the deceased had evaded justice by bribing the police and had to be taught a lesson. He also asks how Skryabin is getting on with the story that he is painstakingly writing on a battered typewriter. Mosin listens to his former superior with genuine affection, as he describes the dauntless hero of an old Yakut legend, and Mosin later confides in Matveev that Skryabin wasn't always so confused or placid. Indeed, he had been a fearless warrior, who had been declared a Hero of the Soviet Union for his efforts as a sapper before being invalided out of the service following a severe concussion.

Yet Skryabin's valour cost him both his psychological well-being and his marriage, with his ex-wife moving to Detroit in search of a better life. She frequently calls their strikingly beautiful daughter, Aida Tumutova, who is secretly engaged to Matveev and runs a fur trading company with Mosin's chubbily spoilt daughter, Anna Korotayeva, who is also having an affair with Matveev, whom she teases for being post-traumatically mute, even though he only had an army desk job. But she knows nothing of his involvement with her partner, whom she resents for her looks and her contacts, as well as her reluctance to put in a hard day's work. Tumutova has little to do with her father, although she does depend on him for money and regularly drops by to badger him into complaining when his pay cheques are late. Indeed, he has a much cosier relationship with two tweenage girls, Varvara Belokurova and Alina Politova, who come to sit in the warm alcove at the end of the cloister-like passage where Skryabin works and listen intently to his tales of Yakut derring-do against their cruel Khailak (or Russian) foes.

Meanwhile, Mosin has been instructed by Vyacheslav Pavlyut to liquidate an underling who has cheated their boss, Vyacheslav Telnov. Mosin summons Matveev from Tumutova's bed to carry out the hit and he trudges through the snowy streets carrying a guitar case until he finds a rundown tenement and assembles his rifle in a room overlooking an enclosed courtyard. He waits for his target to emerge and shoots him and his bodyguards through the darkened glass of their vehicle, which is driven away by Mosin, leaving Matveev to abandon his weapon and speed off in Mosin's car to collect their fee from Pavlyut and his sidekick, Roman Burenkov, who are sitting in the gentleman's club situated above Skryabin's boiler room. Convinced Matveev is a meat-headed palooka, Pavlyut suggests they play blackjack for the cash and he is furious with Burenkov for not rigging the deck when Matveev fleeces him and disappears with his winnings.

Pavlyut visits Mosin to complain about Matveev's behaviour, only to be gunned down and dumped in the inferno. Skryabin readily abets his former sergeant, but their relationship is about to change because Korotayeva has discovered that Tumutova and Matveev are an item and begins to plot her revenge. For the moment, however, Skryabin is happy to chat to Belokurova's father, Petr Semak, who is an army colonel envious of the older man's exploits in Vitebsk and Afghanistan because his duties solely involve selling arms to African rebels. He is content that his daughter is in good hands and, across the city, Mosin is also reminiscing fondly about getting drunk with Skryabin on massandra (an industrial alcohol siphoned from aircraft engines) and lamenting the fact that a man who had once picked his way through a minefield with such consummate ease should have been so debilitated because he happened to be sitting next to a man who accidentally detonated a charge.

Korotayeva has no time for sentiment, however. She is furious with Tumutova for scarcely setting foot inside their shop and complains to her father that she takes 50% of the profit, but does none of the work. She asks Mosin to fire Tumutova, but he guesses what she is really asking him to do and dispatches Matveev to eradicate his fiancée. A born pragmatist, Matveev does what he is told and stabs Tumutova in the stomach. However, he dislodges one of the yellow shoes that Skryabin had bought for her as he stuffs her corpse into a body bag and the stoker recognises the other shoe as it falls to the floor as Matveev and Mosin are consigning her to the flames. Mosin tries to reassure Skryabin that the victim was a whore and a thief, as he settles down to listen to the next instalment of the Yakut fable. But the major insists he is too busy to chat and urges his guest to leave.

The following morning, Skryabin puts coalman Filipp Dyachkov in charge of the furnace and walks to the fur shop to find Tumutova. He is sceptical when Korotayeva says she took her share of the business and left with a man and he rides a tram across the city to his daughter's apartment. Much as he feared, the room is empty and he finds Tumutova's missing shoe lying in the middle of the floor. Without emotion, he opens the stove door and tosses the shoe inside, along with a photograph from the mantelpiece. Changing into the army uniform he keeps in a wardrobe, complete with its impressive row of medals, Skryabin strides purposefully out into the snow.

He calls on Mosin, who is surprised to see him away from his incinerator, and even more astonished when Skryabin stabs him in the chest with a ski pole. When Matveev enters, he gets it in the neck and Skryabin tells the distraught Korotayeva that shooting from a distance isn't real war. Calmly boarding a tram, Skryabin returns to find Belokurova waiting for him. He tells her he has just killed two men, but that it felt very different to proper warfare, as they were supposed to be on the same side. The wide-eyed girl seems to understand and, when Skryabin sits in front of the gaping grate and slits his wrists, she asks if she can take his photograph. Pulling up a stool, she sits quietly beside the old man as he expires and only leaves when he finally slumps forward.

Belokurova takes the manuscript with her and begins to read it in voiceover, as the scene shifts to a monochrome Yakutia in north-eastern Siberia in Tsarist times, where a handsome Khailak named Kostya (Aleksandr Garkushenko) follows a peasant woman called Kermes (Yuliya Men) to her shack. She feeds him and he humiliates her husband, Khabzhii (who is curiously uncredited), before raping her and leaving. Khabzhii is angry with Kermes for failing to put up sufficient resistance and begins to beat her. However, she accepts her punishment and even seems to relish it, providing it isn't too painful. But this is all Skryabin managed to write and the film ends as abruptly as its climactic digression began.

Those familiar with Balabanov's career will recognise that this coda bears a marked resemblance to the Yakutian tale told in the 2002 drama, The River. This was based on `The Limits of Sorrow', a story by the Polish ethnographer Waclaw Sieroszewski, and the fact that Skryabin borrows from the same writer for his opus has convinced many Russian critics that this is an obliquely autobiographical picture. Given Balabanov's change of political stance (with some commentators insisting that he has gone from xenophobe to Russophobe in less than a decade), it's even tempting to equate Skryabin's concussion with Balabanov's own radical rethink. The pair even dress alike and it was the custom in the Soviet past to force struggling artists to undertake menial tasks while they sought inspiration. .

But, while the undercurrents are tantalising, it's the brilliance of the execution (as it were) that makes this so exceptional. The cast is a fascinating mix of professionals and first-timers, with many minor players replicating their off-screen jobs, although there is a notable exception in Vyacheslav Telnov, as, rather than being a ruthless gangster, he is the General Director of the Lenfilm Studio. Each downplays their role to perfection, with Skryabin and Mosin sharing a taciturn world weariness that is positively Kaurismäkian. Some will question the need for the haughty Tumutova and the occasionally over-effusive Korotayeva to be naked when they're first encountered, but this is neither a misogynist nor a misanthropic film. Instead it is a snapshot of a country in transition that forces viewers to ask how much has changed following an equally undistinguished war in Chechnya that has served only to strengthen the grip of the gangsters and the oligarchs and left the Kremlin looking weak and all-too-willing to dispose of its guilty secrets in a metaphorical furnace.

The body count may mount, but no one takes any pleasure in killing. Moreover, Balabanov chillingly juxtaposes the darkest of deeds with the jaunty Latin rhythms of Belorusian guitarist Valerii Didiulia's sublime score, which carries the action through the lengthy cross-town passages that allow cinematographer Aleksandr Simonov to contrast the frosty streets with Anastasiya Karimulina's atmospheric interiors, which are all laid out around the hearths that have long been central to Russian life and art. But, while the music (which also includes contributions from Agata Kristi and Chernyi Lukich) takes the curse off the slaying, along with the sly references to classic fairytales, the fascination Belokurova and Politova have for Skryabin's brutal tales suggest a loss of innocence that can never be regained and this is far bleaker and more disconcerting than any suburban bloodbath, denunciation of a corrupted system or exposé of Russian colonial tyranny.

Echoes of Eric Red's Cohen and Tate (1988) and Michael Winterbottom's Butterfly Kiss (1998) reverberate around Craig Viveiros's The Liability, a darkly comic rite of criminal passage that injects plenty of energy, but little novelty into a well-worn scenario. Yet, while a willing cast works hard to exploit the character quirks in John Wrathall's witty, but patchy screenplay, Viveiros struggles to sustain a sense of farcical suspense and rather wastes the North East's splendidly contrasting industrial, rural and coastal landscapes. Consequently, while this proves a fun watch, it too often strains credibility and draws attention to its own shortcomiings.

Nineteen year-old Jack O'Connell deeply resents the fact that mother Kierston Wareing has taken up with the prim, but seethingly vicious Peter Mullan. Thus, he delights in pranging his expensive car while speeding around the country roads near the expensive house where he has been made to feel decidedly unwelcome. With Wareing being too much of a shrinking violet to protect him, O'Connell is frog-marched into Mullan's office, where he is given a lecture on making something of his life over a game of darts. However, when Mullan leaves to take a phone call, O'Connell takes a peek at his laptop and finds some incriminating images that suggest Mullan is into underage sex, snuff movies or both.

Thinking he has managed to get away with his snooping, O'Connell accepts a chauffeuring job as the first step towards paying off the damage to Mullan's motor. Rising before dawn the next day, he meets up with kitchen fitter Tim Roth at a petrol station, where he seems oblivious to the blanket media coverage of the so-called `Handyman' killings. Blessed with more attitude than sense, O'Connell soon incurs Roth's displeasure by chattering aimlessly while he is trying to concentrate on some paperwork and by listening to music on his phone to drown out the Cuban rhythms that Roth is playing on the hot-wired car's stereo.

Disobeying Roth's order to toss the traceable mobile out of the window, O'Connell drives into Northumberland and Roth reveals over lunch looking out to sea that he is a hitman on his last job before attending his daughter's wedding and retiring. But O'Connell couldn't care less about his plans, as he has spotted the opportunity to have an adventure and is delighted when Roth allows him to act as lookout as he creeps up to a caravan parked deep in some nearby woods. However, as Roth tries to lure Latvian Tomi May out of hiding, the accident-prone O'Connell fails to spot a sniper lurking behind him and the hapless May is swiftly dispatched.

Unconcerned by this turn of events, Roth dons a protective suit to avoid leaving any DNA evidence and, tying May's naked corpse to a tree, prepares to cut off his hands as proof of the slaying. O'Connell begs for a chance to wield the hatchet. But his sudden squeamishness causes a delay that allows the pair to be spotted by backpacker Talulah Riley. For some unknown reason, Roth decides to let O'Connell shoot her and his hesitation not only allows Riley to escape, but also to snatch May's hands and speed off in the stolen car as Roth shatters the rear windscreen with a despairing shot.

Stealing a camper van from hippie couple Jack McBride and Jenny Pike, Roth keeps his cool when O'Connell confesses that his phone is in the side pocket of the driver's door and calls Riley to arrange a rendezvous at a diner off the main road. Having recognised her Latvian accent, Roth is curious about her connection to May. However, O'Connell simply fancies her and is distracted when Roth robs the diner till to raise the ransom for May's hands and only just remembers to block in her car when she attempts a hurried getaway. Forcing some passing customers to make the exchange, Roth calls Mullan to report that his mission has been accomplished. But he is given fresh instructions and tells O'Connell to drive to a vast floodlit chemical plant where they can bury the hands and steal a new vehicle.

However, in spite of himself, Roth has become fond of the needy teen and can't quite bring himself to finish him off. This wavering allows Riley to knock over Roth on the road and load O'Connell's unconscious body into the boot of her car. She chains him to the walkway of an isolated power plant and explains that she has been searching for the men who trafficked and abused her sister. But, just as O'Connell lets slip his name, Roth tracks them down and is wounded after a tussle for his gun and O'Connell feels sufficiently guilty to drive him to the church where his daughter's wedding is to take place and leave him smoking a roll-up on a bench in the graveyard. However, while he torches the van and disposes of the hands in the river, O'Connell defies Roth's order to get rid of the gun and heads home for a showdown with the detested Mullan.

Despite a neat reference to Stephen Frears's The Hit (1984), in which Roth had played an apprentice assassin, the principal influence on this freewheeling, bantering road movie is the early work of Quentin Tarantino and the plethora of macho copycat romps it engendered. Apart from a bizarre sequence in which the fading Roth hallucinates that there are Cuban revolutionaries in the back of the van, Viveiros directs with efficiency rather than inspiration and singularly fails to impart any personality on the highly generic and occasionally derivative material.

Nevertheless, Wrathall slips in some thoughtful asides on parenting and role models, but the convolutedly twisting storyline leaves too little room for much depth or character development. Roth and O'Connell make the most of their badinage and Mullan kicks up a storm as the psychotic pervert with a taste for the good life. But neither Wareing (much of whose performance apparently ended on the cutting-room floor) nor Riley are given much to do, although the latter's deadpan femme fatality clearly entices O'Connell and the picture ends with him debating whether to drive off into the sunset with her or stay with his mum.

The ending of Vehicle 19 is also neatly handled by South African writer-director Mukunda Michael Dewil, a slick actioner that seeks to combine car chases worthy of Peter Yates's Bullitt (1968) or William Friedkin's The French Connection (1971) with the dashboard intimacy that was exploited to such ingenious effect by Abbas Kiarostami in Ten (2002). In truth, the central premise teeters on the unlikeliest contrivance. But, if you are willing to buy into it, this is an imaginatively staged thriller that gives Paul Walker the opportunity to show he hasn't wasted the last few years playing maverick ex-cop Brian O'Conner in the Fast and the Furious franchise.

Dewilplunges the audience into the middle of the action by opening on a shot of Paul Walker hurtling through the streets of downtown Johannesburg with police vehicles and a helicopter in hot pursuit. Just as a pantechnicon rumbles in front of him, the image whites out and a caption proclaiming `earlier...' takes us back to Walker arriving at the airport intent on patching things up with long-suffering wife Leyla Haidarian. Fresh out of prison for an unspecified crime, Walker is breaching his parole by flying to South Africa and he is so desperate to seize his second chance that he lets it pass when the rental company gives him a mini van instead of the sedan he had booked.

Having been let down too many times before, Haidarian gives Walker 20 minutes to reach the embassy where she works. However, the roads are unfamiliar and he quickly gets stuck in a traffic jam. He calls to plead with her to be patient, but she is wary as Walker has had drink problems in the past and can be notoriously unreliable. He is cursing his ill-fortune when a mobile phone rings in the glove compartment. Moments later, a street vendor distracts him at his window while her partner steals his sunglasses from a bag on the passenger seat and Walker becomes even more irate when he drops his snack bar on the floor. Feeling round for it, he finds a silenced revolver and angrily demands to know what is going on when the phone rings a second time.

Already late and keen to keep out of trouble, Walker abandons the vehicle in a junkyard. However, the phone rings again as he is walking away and he cannot resist going back to answer it. He is relieved to hear detective Gys de Villiers telling him that there has been a mix-up and that all will be well if he can deliver the van to a warehouse on the outskirts of the city. However, in trying to find the address, Walker gets stuck in a pothole on some wasteland and he calls Haidarian for directions. Her patience is wearing thin, but she helps him and he promises to be there as soon as he can. But, in bumping the wheel free, Walker loosens a panel in the back seat and a bound and gagged black woman rolls into view.

Walker jumps out to help, but no sooner has he freed her than Naima McLean headbutts him and they struggle for the gun he was pointing at her. Storming back into the driver's seat, he demands to know what is going on. Once again, the rough terrain causes a problem, as the pistol slides within McLean's reach. However, she is quickly disarmed when Walker slams on the brakes and is lucky that the bullet she fires accidentally only grazes his neck. He binds and gags her again, but she tries to jump out of the speeding motor and is only prevented from escaping by her seatbelt.

The phone rings again and a slightly testy De Villiers explains that he knows Walker has absconded from the States and is intent on reaching his wife at the embassy. However, he is prepared to overlook his misdemeanours if he brings the vehicle to the agreed rendezvous. Walker doesn't want to get mixed up in McLean's plight. But he listens as she reveals she is a prosecutor with a top a law firm and has uncovered evidence that the chief of police is part of a sex trafficking ring. Yet, even though she insists that she has been kidnapped to prevent her testifying, Walker still heads for the warehouse and only beats a retreat when they are shot at. McLean fires at the pursuing vehicle before Walker allows it to draw alongside and they flips it over so that it explodes in a ball of flame.

Now convinced that McLean is telling the truth, Walker drives to a nearby township where she can find shelter. However, journalist Andrian Mazive is too scared for his young son to run her story and they are wondering what to do next when Walker discovers that Haidarian has popped out of her office and they speed to the embassy to warn her before De Villiers makes an attempt to snatch her. They succeed in causing a distraction so that Haidarian can slip the clutches of the armed cops and flee back to American soil. But McLean is hit in the chest and she knows immediately that she is not going to survive.

Ordering Walker to make for an underground car park, she dictates her testimony into his phone and tells him to take it to trusted judge Mangaliso Ngema, who is not intimidated by the bully boys in the upper echelons of the force. Leaving her body against a wall, Walker fumes that he has been placed in such an invidious position. He stops to consider his options and pulls the gun on a mugger who tries to rob him at knife point. His mind is made up, however, when De Villiers calls to taunt him that he has been charged with McLean's murder and Walker is reminded of his vicious father's contempt for him and vows to complete his mission. Pouring the miniature bottles of scotch he had in his bag on to the smashed-up phone, he goes in search of Judge Ngema.

As he stops at some traffic lights, Walker sees his picture on the TV news in a shop window and just manages to duck into a car wash as a couple of patrol cars close in on him. Even though his battery is running low, Walker calls Haidarian to leave a message reminding her of a perfect night they once spent together and begs her not to believe the bad things she is going to start hearing about him. Back on the street, he gives shady Welile Nzuza his watch in exchange for a quick paint job and calls Ngema, who urges him not to come to the courthouse as the police have instigated a shoot on sight policy against him.

Following a brush with an Afrikaaner traffic cop more intent on catching some abusive black men in a speeding truck than an American driving while using his phone, Walker is dismayed when his battery packs up just as Ngema is giving him details of a safe house. A hobo pops his head through the window, as Walker searches for the charger, and exhorts him  to `burn it all away'. This seems to convince him that his best bet lies with making a scene outside the courthouse and he finds himself in the middle of the breakneck chase with which the picture started.

Swerving away from the lorry, he crashes through a shop front and careers along an aisle with a cop car keeping pace alongside him. A smart manoeuvre sends this spinning into a chiller cabinet and Walker is able to burst back on to the street through the delivery bay. On reaching the courthouse, however, he sees that a cordon has been thrown up around the building and that it is going to take something spectacular to deliver McLean's message. So, he slams through a roadblock and screeches to a halt at the foot of the steps. Black lieutenant Tshepo Maseko approaches with his gun at the ready. But De Villiers is hot on his heels and tries to take control of the situation. However, Walker manages to grab TV reporter Brandon Lindsay and, with Maseko refusing to allow De Villiers to intervene, he plays McLean's damning declaration into the live microphone.

The feature closes quietly, with a rental car employee smartening up the mini van on the lot, as the radio news declares Walker a hero for risking his life to bring down De Villiers and his superiors. But some will doubtless deem this downbeat denouement to be as disappointing as the pivotal dilemma, as, while Dewil and cinematographer Miles Goodall manage to capture some cracking footage by limiting the action, as far as possible, to the vehicle's interior, this claustrophobic perspective deprives the audience of the kind of high-octane, rubber-burning thrills that would have been provided by even the most formulaic American variation on the theme.

One suspects, however, that a US screenwriter would similarly have ignored the unlikelihood of McLean being abducted, trussed and transported rather than efficiently assassinated, as without this whopping implausibility there simply isn't a film. They would also have probably chosen a car wash as the cornball location for the speech in which Walker cleans up his act and pledges to do the right thing. Nevertheless, this is an effectively staged and played thick ear that make surprisingly shrewd use of the environs glimpsed all-too briefly through Walker's windows. These may reinforce the odd South African cliché and stereotype, but Dewil acutely conveys the sense of disorientation a stranger would feel in trying to negotiate such a complex city as Joburg. In many ways, this recalls the kind of low-budget outings that Luc Besson produces from time to time and it is well worth a look when it becomes available on DVD almost as soon as its brief theatrical window closes.

South Africa also provides the starting point for one of the best music documentaries of recent times, as first-time director Jay Bulger goes in search of the wild man of drumming in Beware of Mr Baker. Two years after blagging his way into Ginger Baker's compound to write an article for Rolling Stone magazine, Bulger returns to Tulbagh in the Western Cape and is first seen being rapped on the nose with his host's walking stick for daring to include interviews with some of his past collaborators in the film. However, it soon transpires that such behaviour is entirely normal and even seems moderate in comparison with some of Baker's more excessive antics since he first burst on to the music scene in the early 1960s.

According to Johnny Rotten, everyone viewing this profile should prostrate themselves in gratitude for what Ginger Baker has achieved. However, a montage of celebrity drummers and former bandmates suggests that Baker's greatness has come at a considerable cost to himself and others and it quickly becomes clear as Bulger starts to interview him in his favourite armchair that age has not mellowed Baker in the slightest. He was born in Lewisham on 19 August 1939 and lost his war hero father four and a half years later. Looking back, Baker realises he enjoyed the excitement of the air raids and still has a thing for explosions. But the absence of a role model led to him going off the rails as a teenager and he joined a gang.

During a shoplifting expedition to a record shop, however, Baker heard the Charlie Parker album Quintet of the Year and he suddenly discovered something to which he could relate. His mother beat him for stealing the disc and his former gangmates sliced him with razors for desertion. But Baker started fighting back after he read the advice to stand up for himself and be a man that his father had written in the letter he left to be opened on his son's 14th birthday. Sister Pat Wallis says he inherited the Baker temper, but he also had a natural sense of rhythm and timing and was playing in jazz bands almost as soon as he left school. Unfortunately, following a meeting with Phil Seamen in the Flamingo club in London, he also became a regular heroin user, but absolved himself because he felt the drug enabled him to play with the freedom that he heard on the records of African drummers in Seamen's collection.

It would take 19 years for Baker finally to conquer his addiction, by which time he had fathered three children with first wife Elizabeth Finch. Daughter Ginette laughs off the fact that she survived a botched abortion and siblings Leda and Kofi also agree that Baker was always closer to his drums than he ever was to them. They were certainly key to his fame and fortune, as replaced Charlie Watts in Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated in the early 1960s and reunited with bassist Jack Bruce, who had once impressed him when he jammed with one of his earlier combos. He was less taken with Mick Jagger when he guested on one number, but he struck up a friendship with another charismatic frontman when he joined The Graham Bond Organisation in 1963.

Hailed by their peers as one of the decade's most significant groups, this distinctive quartet cropped up in movies like Robert Hartford-Davis's Gonks Go Beat (1965). But they didn't quite fit into the contemporary pop scene, while chemicals fuelled the tensions between Baker and Bruce that finally erupted when the former pulled a knife during a fight and the latter was fired. With Bond also invariably under the influence, the band fell apart and Bruce was astonished when Baker invited him to play alongside Eric Clapton in Cream.

Drummers Neil Peart (Rush), Bill Ward (Black Sabbath), Chad Smith (Red Hot Chili Peppers), Max Weinberg (The E Street Band), Carmine Appice (Vanilla Fudge), Lars Ulrich (Metallica), Stewart Copeland (The Police) and Nick Mason (Pink Floyd) all proclaim they owe their careers to Baker. Yet, as clips play of `I Feel Free', `Sunshine of Your Love' and `White Room', he insists he is not a rock drummer and never has been. Moreover, he complains bitterly that his crucial role in the arrangement of tracks on the albums Fresh Cream, Disraeli Gears and Goodbye brought him little financial reward, as the songwriting royalties were shared by Bruce and lyricist Peter Brown. But there were perks, with Elizabeth and roadie Bob Adcock recalling the groupies who swarmed over the trio, while Denny Laine reveals that they were idolised by Jimi Hendrix and Carlos Santana and Mickey Hart from The Grateful Dead remember the impact they had on America with their supersonic `Holy Ghost' music.

But after just two hectic years together, Baker, Bruce and Clapton went their separate ways. Bruce regrets that they couldn't work things out, as they had such amazing musical chemistry. However, the easy-going Clapton couldn't take the feuding within the rhythm section and was horrified when Baker turned up on his doorstep as he was putting together his next supergroup, Blind Faith, with Steve Winwood and Ric Grech. This enterprise proved equally short-lived (1968-69), but Baker had a greater freedom to play and revelled in the trappings his success brought him. He was even unfazed when he heard on the radio that he had been found dead in a hotel room of a heroin overdose. But he knew he was pushing his luck and tried to clean up his act in Hawaii and Jamaica (where the temptations came thick and fast) before arriving back in Britain to discover that Clapton had quit to tour with Delaney & Bonnie and that Winwood was in the process of reforming Traffic.

Baker tells Bulger he has no hard feelings about Clapton twice walking out on him and insists he remains his best friend on the planet. But Clapton isn't sure he ever got to know Baker and concedes that there are whole areas of his life about which he knows nothing. He kept his distance, therefore, as Ginger Baker's Air Force harked back to the big band era. Denny Laine recalls the thrill of being part of such an ambitious jazz fusion project alongside Winwood, Grech, Seamen and Bond. But it also fell apart after some 18 months and two albums that Melody Maker journalist Chris Welch reckons cost Baker a small fortune to record and promote.

Reminiscing about this period leads Bulger to compare Baker to contemporaries like The Who's Keith Moon and Led Zeppelin's John Bonham. However, he is furious to be branded a rock drummer and Clapton rallies to his cause by describing him as a proper musician, who could compose and arrange as well as play. Indeed, Baker prefers to compare himself with Elvin Jones, Phil Seamen and Art Blakey, with whom he had famous drum jousts in the early 1970s (which are recalled in a slick montage of footage and stills that is brilliantly cut to a rapid fire beat). But Baker was in no mood to rest on his laurels and decamped to Africa, where documentarist Tony Palmer filmed him motoring across the Sahara. However, it was only when he reached the Nigerian capital that Baker finally found what he had been searching.

Fela Kuti was the driving force behind Afrobeat and, from the moment Baker saw him at the Afro Spot in Lagos, he recognised a kindred spirit. Sandra Izsadore, Remi Kabaka and Michael Veal all insist that Baker was lucky to play with such a cultural icon. But his son, Femi, remembers they were like brothers and Baker risked his life by spending six years in such an unstable country to increase his understanding of African music. He even opened his own studio and became a part of his political party, Movement of the People. However, the friendship was doomed when Baker became obsessed with polo and started mixing with the very elite that Kuti wished to sweep aside. Thus, when the army attacked his headquarters in 1977, he severed his ties and Baker only just managed to escape when his studio was raided and he lost every penny he had invested in it.

Returning to Blighty, Baker joined Adrian and Paul Gurvitz in the Baker Gurvitz Army, largely because no one else would play with him. He was also hit with an enormous tax bill after the Inland Revenue saw a BBC film about his polo stable and Elizabeth and the children were evicted from their home just as he eloped to Italy with an 18 year-old named Sarah, who was the sister of Ginette's first boyfriend. Baker was off drugs at this point, but began using again during the recording of the Hearts on Fire album and footage shows him falling off his drum stool while preparing for a TV performance. Yet he remained in demand and Johnny Rotten sent producer Bill Laswell to find him to play on a Public Image album. However, Baker was in a dark place after the bored Sarah dumped him for a younger man and he accepted an offer to star in the third-rate TV series, Nasty Boys (1990).

Baker now considers this the stupidest thing he has ever seen. But worse was to follow when he was reduced to placing an advertisement in Music Connection magazine in the hope of finding a new band. Visiting around this time, Ginette barely recognised her father, as he had gone to look so old. However, he married for a third time after meeting Karen Loucks, who felt he needed looking after. She sufficiently bolstered his confidence to join Masters of Reality in 1992 and the Sunrise on the Sufferbus album was widely admired. But the kids in the audience had no idea who Baker was and threw things at him during gigs.

Tired of playing the rock star, Baker and Loucks opened a polo club in Colorado and jammed after games with Ron Miles and his band DJQ20. Now also a drummer of some repute, Kofi started playing with his father, who got to meet one of his heroes when Max Roach came to a gig in New York. But, Ginger being Baker, it was only a matter of time before things went awry. When one of his English grooms was arrested for not having a visa, Baker launched into an anti-American tirade on the Lewis and Floorwax radio show and was promptly deported. Before he left, he hurled a volley of abuse at Kofi and the pair have never spoken since. He also broke up with Karen (whom he refuses to discuss) and relocated to South Africa.

Now married to Zimbabwean Kudzai Machokoto (who is very hesitant when Bulger asks if Baker is a good stepfather to her 12 year-old daughter Lisa), Baker tried to replicate the polo-jazz combination, but couldn't find musicians of a sufficient calibre. He reunited with Clapton and Bruce at the Royal Alber Hall in 2005 and blew the $5 million he made from the concerts on 24 British horses. Stricken with degenerative osteoarthritis and occasionally forced to wear an oxygen mask, Baker was broke and on the point of selling the ranch when he bashed Bulger on the nose at the end of the shoot. Yet, Clapton and Bruce remain loyal to the cantankerous maverick and reaffirm his greatness as an artist. Thus, they can hardly have been surprised when, 18 months after filming ended, Baker made a comeback. Bulger films him on stage in Salzburg in 2011 and Baker can still belt it out with the best of them. So, maybe Johnny Rotten has it right when he concludes that being a madman is a small price to pay for being able to play such perfect music.

Adeptly edited by Abhay Sofsky, this is a compelling portrait of a wayward genius. Musically, Ginger Baker is in a league of his own and even the children he has so callously neglected seem prepared to make allowances for his eccentricities and derelictions. But, while Bulger chronicles the career capably enough, he is much less interested in drum technique, classic tracks and band break-ups than he is in the man behind the notoriety. Consequently, the most important moment in the whole film comes at the end when he asks Baker to remove the sunglasses he has worn throughout the interview sessions and a pair of sullen, exhausted eyes squint in the glare of the spotlights. The toll taken by the ravages is plain to see and, instead of a rock titan with a thousand anecdotes and a bad word to say about everyone, Baker suddenly seems like a very old man.

True to form, however, just as he appears beaten, Baker bounces back off the canvas and prepares to slug it out one last time and his exhilaration after the Salzburg gig proves a more than fitting finale. It also brings Bulger's own story full circle and he deserves enormous credit for coaxing Baker into being so candid about his triumphs and disasters. At times, he bigs up his own part in proceedings and interviews too many famous faces with nothing useful to say. He also overdoes the animated inserts produced in a stark charcoal-like style by David Bell, with the repeated image of Baker rowing in the bowels of an ancient galley to map his peregrinations rather hammering home the notion that he has always been a slave to the rhythm. But his rapport with an ever-tetchy, chain-smoking subject enables him to elicit several acidic gems, including Baker's jaundiced views on heavy metal, his supposed drumming rivals and his own demons and tendency to self-destruct. Moreover, Bulger's refusal to be starstruck ensures that this is never anything less than honest in its appraisal of the man, his myth and his music.