The movie includes never-before-seen footage of the Doors backstage and in the studio, as well as fluky clips of Morrison, bearded but not yet bloated, driving through the desert (they're from an aborted 1969 film project called Highway). DiCillo also does a haunting job of reconstructing, through films and photographs, the legendary Miami concert where Morrison was arrested for an indecent exposure he never got to commit. The singer's elevation into a leaping and whirling Dionysian prince in dark curls, conch belt, and leather pants is one of the great operatic-erotic spectacles in rock. The film gets that drama, and the drama of his alcoholic descent as well.
When You're Strange does have one major idiosyncrasy. There are no interviews — at all. The movie is stitched together with a narration, spoken by Johnny Depp, that sounds like a highly enlightened Wikipedia entry. Yet DiCillo knows what made this band great. He does justice to the music — to the spangly stoned grandeur of ''The Crystal Ship'' and to the dark majesty of ''Light My Fire,'' to every song in which Jim Morrison, with his lordly baritone, seemed to be entering heaven and hell at the same time.
