TIFF Review: “Pretenders”

Pretenders (Joss Crowley, 2026) 3½ out of 5 stars

By now, the conventions of nonfiction biopics are familiar and, if done well, also enjoyable. Pick any public figure—or musical group—that you admire, and chances are that a competently made movie will engage and entertain. Such is the case with Pretenders, the latest foray into the genre from director Joss Crowley (Simple Minds: Everything Is Possible). It may not reinvent the cinematic wheel, but it’s fun to watch.

As a kid, I listened to The Pretenders quite a lot. Songs like “Brass in Pocket” (from their self-titled 1980 debut album), “Back on the Chain Gang” and “2000 Miles” (from the 1984 Learning to Crawl, their third album), and “Don’t Get Me Wrong” (from the fourth album, Get Close) helped form the soundtrack of my teen years and beyond (speaking of such, I also remember hearing “Don’t Get Me Wrong” in Ron Howard’s meh 1986 Michael Keaton vehicle Gung Ho). Band founder and lead singer/rhythm guitarist Chrissie Hynde’s evocative voice is forever ingrained in my memory, and that’s a good thing.

Here, we hear quite a lot from Hynde, though mostly as voiceover, since she only consented to be filmed on camera for the final interview of a number conducted over the past three years (and what we see of present-day Hynde is shot on a long lens in a stylized frame-within-a-frame). She acts as one of our principal guides through her own personal history and that of The Pretenders. The only other on-camera interview we see (we hear plenty of others speak) is with Stan Tippins, formerly of the band The Doc Thomas Group (which later became Mott the Hoople), who served as the Pretenders’ tour manager in their 1980s heyday.

I had always mistakenly thought that Hynde was English, given the origins of the band in the London music scene and the nationality of the other three members, but no, she is from Akron, OH. We learn a lot about that place in the 1950s and ‘60s, during Hynde’s childhood, and how stifling the city became to Hynde in her adolescence. It didn’t help that the town was partly destroyed in that era’s misguided Robert Moses-inspired construction of an interstate through the center. After high school, Hynde went first to Kent State (and was there during their violent period) and then to the U.K.

The strength of the movie is in its careful, detailed laying out of events, even if the identity of some of the overlapping voices occasionally proves hard to remember. We learn how The Pretenders came to be (after some previous false starts), who else was in the group—James Honeyman-Scott on lead guitar, Pete Farndon on bass, and Martin Chambers on drums—and how two of those initial members died of drug overdoses before the release of the third album, replaced by Robbie McIntosh on lead guitar and Malcolm Foster on bass. As with so many rock groups, addiction is a demon that only some can overcome. Fortunately, though she partook, Hynde was never a victim.

As a result, she is able to narrate our story, a sometimes-ornery but manifestly clear-eyed chaperone through the highs and the lows of her life and career. The jump from the mid-1980s to the present feels a bit rushed, coming on the heels of the jam-packed earlier parts, but Pretenders remains a solidly satisfying experience throughout. Time to go back and listen to those enduring hits again.

Christopher Llewellyn Reed

Chris Reed is the editor of Film Festival Today. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.