Why Mick Jagger is cinema's greatest scene-stealer

Mick Jagger makes a rare return to cinemas this week, playing a cut-throat art collector with glorious aplomb in The Burnt Orange Heresy. His screen time is limited – 15 minutes, that’s it – but he revels impishly in this role, and easily walks off with the whole film.

It’s his first performance as anyone other than Mick Jagger in a long time. Give or take a tiny cameo in The Bank Job (2008) as “Bank Employee – Safe Deposit (uncredited)”, it’s about 20 years since Jagger dabbled. While he has at least one immortal piece of film work on his résumé, in Donald Cammell and Nic Roeg’s Performance (1970), this side career of his is a strange, stalled thing, with flashes of major potential, some tantalising near-misses, and the occasional pearl of a guest appearance.

“It’s not my main business,” Jagger has declared. But imagining what might have been, from a performer with more louche charisma in his little fingertips than most of us have outright, is irresistible. No less a light than Werner Herzog, who was forced to cut Jagger out of Fitzcarraldo (1982), called him “a tragic gap in the history of film” and “someone who could have been a great actor”. Even the tiniest glimpses are memorable.

Something held him back – distinctly more so than David Bowie. You could argue Bowie’s shape-shifting artistic persona cut him out better to slip into other people’s skins. His, too, was a dilettantish acting career, but he nurtured it better, and the highlights were more substantial.

Jagger is always somehow Jagger, which films have either milked to their advantage or ignored to their detriment. Both avenues find examples in 1970, when he took on his two biggest roles back-to-back, and torpedoed his options as a star when they’d only just beckoned.

On the one hand, he’s famously devilish and ideally cast as Turner, the reclusive rocker in Performance we meet halfway through, when he gives refuge to James Fox’s runaway gangster. He’s at once satyr and shaman, sprawled among the rococo furnishings of Turner’s Notting Hill town house, and absolutely in cahoots with the film’s descent into trippy experimentation. It’s a form of self-portrait, but one which theoretically promised huge things.

While a revered cult artefact now, it did no one many favours at the time. Warner Bros didn’t understand what on earth Roeg and Cammell had delivered, and delayed the film’s release by a year. Even the critical response was uncomprehendingly hostile back then (“needless, boring sadism”, said Variety).

Problematic as it was, Performance should have been a blazing launch pad for Jagger’s acting, but it opened second to his far less auspicious lead performance in Tony Richardson’s folksy western Ned Kelly. Playing Australia’s most infamous outlaw with a wispy Amish beard and wandering accent, Jagger infuriated just about everyone on the continent, including Kelly’s descendants, when he took the role. “I want to concentrate on being a character actor,” he bullishly stated.

The shoot in New South Wales was a disaster, stalled by numerous injuries, and by Jagger’s then-girlfriend Marianne Faithfull, the female lead, taking an overdose when they split up. She recovered from a coma, but was sent home and replaced.

“It was like having a stillborn child,” Richardson said of the project, which he’d taken up after an aborted Karel Reisz/Albert Finney attempt in the early Sixties. Gravely disappointed, neither he nor Jagger even showed up for the film’s London premiere, and Jagger still attests he’s never seen it.

A lot of blame can be heaped on Ned Kelly for this acting career that never quite was. The film – not awful by any means – is a curio just about worth sitting through, but Jagger’s much the worst thing in it. (The same part defeated Heath Ledger just as badly in 2003.) It’s a test case for Jagger trying to shoulder a whole film in “character actor” mode, and failing through inexperience: he looks deeply uncomfortable on a horse, for starters.

The next two times he might have wowed on screen, the roles got scrapped. He was cast in Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo as Wilbur, the rubber baron’s savant assistant, but when lead actor Jason Robards got dysentery, everything had to be reshot with Klaus Kinski, and Jagger’s Stones touring schedule prevented him continuing.

Herzog’s bitter regret at losing him is backed up by some out-takes which thankfully exist: they show Jagger prowling inimitably around Robards while reciting Richard III’s “winter of discontent” speech. He was also meant to play a nasty lover, Axel Rex, in a 1986 film of Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark, which fell apart when the director and star, Laszlo Papas and Rebecca DeMornay, had a bust-up.

And then, what? He’s Vacendak, a heavily armoured rent-a-baddy, in the endearing sci-fi flop Freejack (1992), climbing in and out of tanks to bag a fleeing Emilio Estevez in future New York. When Jagger resumes chase with “one mississippi, two mississippi”, we see those lips hissing in silhouette, and it’s the film’s best moment.

For a few minutes in drag, as a torch-singer and nightclub owner called Greta, he lights up the grotty film of Martin Sherman’s Bent (1997) with a rendition of Streets of Berlin, to a melody Philip Glass composed. He’s perched on a trapeze high above the revelling debauch, on the Night of the Long Knives, and it’s the film’s best moment.

Are we sensing a pattern? Before giving The Burnt Orange Heresy all its best moments, his only recent role of substance was in The Man from Elysian Fields (2001), a forgotten LA drama from George Hickenlooper, starring Andy Garcia as a novelist-turned-gigolo. There are reasons it’s forgotten. But Jagger is mesmerising, as an ageing male escort who props up after-hours bars and knows the life. At dinner with his oldest client (Anjelica Huston), Jagger’s Luther proposes a new arrangement based on love. The scene is remarkable for its wounded sadness, and perhaps the best stand-alone proof of the talent Herzog espied.

Mick Jagger may have scuppered his earliest bids to be a film star, but there’s almost nothing he’s appeared in since that he hasn’t slyly stolen. Perhaps he became a great, elusive character actor after all.

The Burnt Orange Heresy is in cinemas now