Wham!

In the '80s, young people were still unemployed and angry, but they preferred to let off steam at the disco

(George Michael)

What's the best antidote to the glut of music docu-films that has characterised recent years? At a glance, two approaches stand out: managing to tell an artist's story in a faithful and original way (as Brett Morgen did, for instance, with David Bowie in “Moonage Daydream”), or trying to broaden the perspective, using the musical story as a pretext for telling a bigger tale, or as a key to decoding an entire era. Chris Smith's “Wham!” (available on Netflix) hits both targets with real ease. And it's no coincidence that it has won praise even from non-fans of the English duo, including those who, back in the day, subscribed to the official narrative pushed by certain critics, according to which Wham! were little more than a harmless, disposable boy band, if not the very epitome of everything wrong with the frivolous Eighties. It's no coincidence either because, looked at slyly, this story could well be dedicated to exactly those critics, even though, of course, it's about something else entirely: its protagonists, and an entire decade.

“Wham!” is, first and foremost, the story of a friendship: that between Andrew Ridgeley and Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou, later known as George Michael. A friendship born well before, and lasting well beyond, the five years Wham! existed. The two met in 1975, at Meads School in Bushey, Hertfordshire. Andrew, a year older, soon took on the role of guide for his "small, odd, shy friend", whom he affectionately nicknamed Yog. A role he would keep, contrary to popular belief, even within Wham!, which was essentially his creation, as his mate would later acknowledge — though Andrew's partner possessed a superior talent that would soon overshadow the very name of the group and launch him into a solo career.

United by their foreign roots — Ridgeley is half-Egyptian, Panayiotou is Greek-Cypriot — the two cemented their friendship over shared musical tastes, from the Elton John of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” to the alien Bowie of “Ziggy Stardust”. It all led, inevitably, to a school band, The Executive, formed together with Andrew's brother Paul Ridgeley, David Mortimer and Andrew Leaver. "We were terrible, basically, after a year it was over because people wouldn't show up to rehearsals or gigs," is our pair's own official account. But it was precisely that messy ska experience that served as the launchpad for Wham!.

I may not have a job

But I have a good time

With the boys that I meet down on the line

Without ever flaunting sociological ambitions, Smith's documentary works as a litmus test for the 1980s in England, first digging into its roots, sunk deep in the leaden gloom of the Thatcher era, against which the last wave of punk had (in vain) railed. More than the nihilistic cry of no future, what would actually chip away at that frigid austerity was pop itself, with its colourful, unconventional approach — a cause Wham! championed, spreading a message of freedom and transgression, including through their eccentric look (those terrible short shorts!) and their "protest choreography" (as they put it). Nor did they shy away from the odd jab at social issues, as shown by the cheeky single "Wham! Rap", which marked the duo's 1982 debut. "In the '80s, young people were still unemployed and angry, but they preferred to let off steam at the disco," recalls a young George Michael, restating an essential truth about the decade already highlighted by the protagonists of another fine documentary of the era, Bruce Ashby and Michael Donald's account of the nights at the Blitz club (“Blitzed!”, 2022). Club culture as a response to unemployment, sexual fluidity as a reaction to the reactionary conformism of the Iron Lady's England. A push that, however, wouldn't be enough for "Yog" himself to find the courage for the coming out he'd wanted to make as early as 19, after revealing his sexual orientation to his friend Andrew and backing singer Shirley Holliman. "I said I was going to talk to my mum and dad, and I was persuaded it wasn't the best idea," George Michael recalls in the documentary. "But I don't think they were trying to protect my career or theirs, I think they were thinking about my dad. Because when you're 19, that's as far as your thinking goes. You look at your parents and think: 'Don't tell your parents, your dad will lose his mind.' At that moment I really wanted to come out, but then I completely lost my nerve." Courage he would only find in 1993, when, following the death from Aids of his partner, Brazilian designer Anselmo Feleppa, he wrote a moving letter to his parents.

The Georgios/George Michael dichotomy is indeed one of the documentary's key narrative threads: a painful, wrenching contrast between the man's insecurity and confusion over his own identity, including his sexuality, and the artist's growing success — at once a refuge from his personal torments and a cage limiting the full expression of his personality. "The turning point with Wham! for me," he recounts in a pivotal moment of the film, "was when I suddenly thought, oh my god, I'm a massive star and I'm gay — the depression was really about feeling trapped. Since I'd come out to Andrew, he knew that what was at stake wasn't just the band, but my sanity. And he never pushed me to carry on. He already knew why I felt trapped." In short, giving up his freedom to love as the price of success. A theme already explored in the past, but one that resurfaces vividly in "Wham!", offering an unprecedented portrait of the young artist who scored four number ones in a single year, and who ended up privately regretting (though, out of modesty, only to himself) that the charity anthem "Do They Know It's Christmas" by Band Aid, which he himself took part in, had prevented his own "Last Christmas" from setting a new record (one it would finally claim, alas, only in 2021, becoming the song that took the longest ever to reach number one).

Beyond giving the Wham! saga a cultural and social dimension, Smith's film succeeds in drawing the viewer into the human dynamics between the pair, overturning long-held clichés (starting with the entirely baseless notion of Ridgeley as a mere "sidekick"), while wrong-footing, moving and lending credibility to the whole thing through an entirely archive-based edit that mimics flipping through one of the scrapbooks kept by Andrew's mother, with the two protagonists' voices serving as voiceover. Equally decisive is the choice to rely almost exclusively on testimony from the period itself, starting with George and Andrew's own words, forgoing the usual parade of nostalgic old-timers reminiscing about the past that so often defines this kind of production. Everything unfolds within those five years, plunging the viewer back into English living rooms where cathode-ray tubes broadcast Top of the Pops, into the long queues of fans lining up for concerts (including the historic 1985 show in China, already documented by Lindsay Anderson in "Wham! in China: Foreign Skies"), and among the pages of the era's newspapers, which slated the band with stubborn obtuseness.

Fast-paced and gripping, "Wham!" retains all the freshness of the duo's hits, which flash by in quick succession: "Young Guns", which took off thanks to an unplanned appearance on Top of the Pops, "Bad Boys", loved by fans but hated by its own author, "Club Tropicana", with its glossy, crowd-pleasing video, the aching "Where Did Your Heart Go", the irresistibly catchy "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" (whose title has a curious backstory), the driving "Everything She Wants" and "Freedom", the aforementioned Christmas anthem "Last Christmas", right up to "Careless Whisper", at the centre of another crucial turning point in George Michael's artistic coming-of-age: he rejected the version produced by guru Jerry Wexler, who had also produced Aretha Franklin, reworking it himself and hitting on the perfect saxophonist for the famous solo, Steve Gregory (curiously, despite being one of the few songs co-written with Ridgeley, it was released in the US as "Wham! feat. George Michael"). Pop songs with funky and soul undertones, marking the rise of an original, innovative band that for too long wasn't taken seriously, perhaps because of that cartoonish name, those unlikely outfits, and its army of teenage fans (and to learn more about them, it's well worth reading "Wham! George & Io", Andrew Ridgeley's autobiography, reissued for the occasion).

Smith's approach is always delicate, respectful, never rhetorical yet decidedly moving, especially as it nears the finale: the gradual emergence in George Michael of an awareness of his own unique talent as a songwriter and singer (acknowledged too by a wonderful testimony from the era given by Elton John), Ridgeley's touching acceptance of reality, willing to step aside with genuine selflessness so as not to stand in the way of his friend's destiny as a star, the epilogue of "The Final", the farewell concert at Wembley, with the two embracing onstage and George's final words ("I would never have been on this stage without you") and Andrew's ("Wham! would never have been fifty-year-olds, or anything other than that pure representation of us as young men"). And so, like a coming-of-age story, the arc concludes with a separation that feels like the end of youth, leading to George Michael's stellar solo career but also to his tragic personal epilogue (on a cursed Christmas, that of 2016, he was found dead in his home at just 53 years old). As if, beyond the Club Tropicana of those years of carefree euphoria, the fate of a cruel reality awaited him.

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