General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll is a 2010 British biographical drama about the singer-songwriter Ian Dury, frontman of Ian Dury and the Blockheads, directed by Mat Whitecross and written by Paul Viragh, with Andy Serkis starring as Dury¹. The title comes from Dury's 1977 single "Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll", the song that put the phrase into common usage². The film follows Dury from a childhood marked by polio and institutional care through his rise to fame with the Blockheads in the late 1970s, told against a backdrop of his greatest hits³.

Key fact	Detail
Subject	Ian Dury, British new wave and punk-era singer-songwriter and Blockheads frontman¹
Director / writer	Mat Whitecross (his first solo feature); screenplay by Paul Viragh¹^•⁴
Lead performance	Andy Serkis as Ian Dury, singing the classic tracks himself with the real Blockheads⁵
Principal cast	Naomie Harris, Olivia Williams, Bill Milner, Toby Jones, Tom Hughes, Noel Clarke, Mackenzie Crook, Ray Winstone, Wesley Nelson³
Format	UK, 2010, 115 minutes, English, drama and music¹
Premiere	North American premiere at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival¹
Reception	Metascore 57 from 6 reviews; IMDb rating 6.5/10 from about 4,600 users; 2 BAFTA nominations among 1 win and 6 nominations total⁶

Spoilers

Subject and story

The film portrays Ian Dury, who contracted polio in childhood and was institutionalised, and who formed the cult band Kilburn and the High Roads in 1971 before enjoying a string of hits with the Blockheads, including "What a Waste", "Hit Me with Your Rhythm Stick", and "Reasons to Be Cheerful Part 3", and the albums New Boots and Panties and Do It Yourself⁷. Dury died in March 2000 at the age of 58⁷.

Structure. The film takes a non-linear approach, keeping Dury's music at its center in the form of a live performance punctuated by narrative strands covering his education at a school for the disabled, his relationship with his distant father (Ray Winstone), and his inability to commit emotionally to relationships⁸. Screen Daily described the framing device as Dury presented as a greasepainted music hall MC giving a vaudeville-style flashback to his life⁹. Director Mat Whitecross, who had co-directed and edited The Road to Guantanamo and The Shock Doctrine with Michael Winterbottom, structured the film as if it were one of Dury's songs, with vivid vignettes and a new wave tempo¹⁰^•¹.

Family relationships form the emotional core. The story runs Dury's relationship with his son in parallel with his own childhood, showing a charismatic, crippled boy who overcomes great personal odds³. Olivia Williams plays his wife, Naomie Harris his girlfriend, and Bill Milner his son Baxter¹¹. The portrait was sanctioned by Baxter Dury, who said he "bled internally" upon viewing Serkis bring back the ghost of his father, while some family members felt the film did not go far enough in exposing his behavior¹².

Spasticus Autisticus. A significant episode covers Dury's 1981 song "Spasticus Autisticus", written after he was signed up to promote the 1981 International Year of Disabled Persons. Dury used his disability to subvert the traditional rock star image, and the song, inspired by the "I am Spartacus" scene in Stanley Kubrick's film as a riposte to the International Year of Disabled Persons, was denied airplay by the BBC¹³^•¹⁴.

Production

Serkis, known for his performance-capture roles as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings trilogy and the title character in King Kong, took it upon himself to turn Dury's life story into the film and also served as a producer¹⁰^•³. Shooting was scheduled to begin on May 3, 2009⁷. Work on the multiple animated sequences, along with the front and end credits, began before shooting started in April 2009 and finished in November of that year¹⁵.

The pop artist Peter Blake designed the credit titles; he had been one of Dury's teachers at the Royal College of Art in the 1960s, and the opening titles are built around a live Ian Dury performance intercut with the birth of Dury's son Baxter and scenes of Ian and Russell driving to a gig¹⁵^•¹⁴. Chaz Jankel, Dury's Blockheads collaborator, is credited as composer, with Christopher Ross and Brian Tufano sharing cinematography and Peter Christellis editing¹.

Reception

The film premiered in North America at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival and opened in the UK in January 2010¹^•¹⁶. Critics consistently singled out Serkis. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian called his performance barnstorming and passionate, noting that Serkis sings all the classic tracks with the real band and that his vocals are "eerily good"⁵. Time Out gave it 4 of 5 stars, calling it "a riot of clattering noise and kaleidoscopic colour" and praising Whitecross for refusing the sanitized, reverential biopic approach of Control and Nowhere Boy¹⁶.

More mixed reviews targeted the film around the performance. Robert Abele of the Los Angeles Times wrote that Serkis's "performance of spit, grit and wit so ferocious" only clarified how unremarkable and formulaic the rest of the movie was¹⁷. Anthony Quinn in The Independent judged that what the film projects as Dury's loveable irascibility too often looks like charmlessness, and that the film may not enhance its subject's reputation¹¹. The aggregated Metascore was 57 from 6 reviews, with scores ranging from 50 (Variety, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times) to 80 (The Hollywood Reporter, New York Daily News)¹⁸.

The film received two BAFTA Award nominations among 1 win and 6 nominations total⁶.

Place in British music biopics

The film arrived amid a wave of low-budget British rock biopics that followed Anton Corbijn's Control (2007) about Joy Division's Ian Curtis, continuing with Nick Moran's Telstar about producer Joe Meek and Sam Taylor-Wood's Nowhere Boy about the young John Lennon¹⁹. Reviewers placed it against that field: Time Out argued it broke from the drab, reverential treatment of recent British music films, while the Guardian's Philip French noted its impressionistic style of fast cutting, animation, varieties of color, fantasy, and newsreel clips¹⁶^•¹⁴.

The film ends some time before Dury's death from cancer in March 2000 and does not cover his late career as an actor, which included cameo roles in Hearts of Fire with Bob Dylan, Judge Dredd with Sylvester Stallone, Roman Polanski's Pirates, and Peter Greenaway's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, or his second marriage¹⁴^•⁷.

The FX television series of the same name

A separate American comedy series titled Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll premiered on FX on July 16, 2015. Created by and starring Denis Leary, it features Leary as Johnny Rock, a washed-up former lead singer of the early-1990s band The Heathens, who encounters Gigi (Elizabeth Gillies), the daughter he did not know he had, when she arrives in New York with the money and the plan to reunite the band with herself as lead singer²⁰^•²¹. The cast also includes John Corbett as Flash, Elaine Hendrix as Ava, Robert Kelly as Bam Bam, and John Ales as Rehab²⁰. It shares no connection with the 2010 Ian Dury film beyond the title phrase.

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026