‘Have You Got It Yet?’ Review: A Pink Floyd Enigma Illuminated

The basic rock legends who died younger are sadly quite a few: Hendrix, Joplin, Cobain. Syd Barrett, a founding father of Pink Floyd, lived to be 60 — hardly a ripe previous age. But his creative demise, a protracted one, occurred in his 20s, and he had turn into a recluse earlier than he turned 30.

The documentary “Have You Got It Yet? (The Story of Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd)” is lengthy within the making — its co-director, Storm Thorgerson, an acclaimed album designer and a buddy of Barrett’s, died in 2013 — however it’s as complete and coherent an account of Barrett’s counterculture tragedy as one may hope for. And whereas the movie, co-directed by Roddy Bogawa, illuminates Barrett to a larger diploma than some other account I’ve come throughout, it maintains the artist’s enigma.

Not out of romanticizing him; as enigmas go, Barrett was the true deal. In his transient public tenure because the face of Pink Floyd, Barrett didn’t overtly put out a messianic line like different rock stars of the period. But he was innately magnetic. David Gilmour, who took the guitar duties in Pink Floyd after Barrett may now not perform, was, like the opposite band members, a buddy of Barrett’s from the early ’60s. He calls the person “fiercely intelligent” and says that, earlier than Barrett was ravaged by drug abuse and psychological sickness, “life was just too easy for him, in a way.”

He wrote songs about underwear snatchers, gnomes and the photo voltaic system. (Post-Barrett, Floyd turned extra grandiose, socially acutely aware and commercially large.) His psychedelia had a pressure of Edwardian whimsy, till it didn’t; certainly one of his final Floyd songs was referred to as “Scream Thy Last Scream” and it wasn’t kidding. The movie intersperses frank speaking head interviews — Thorgerson, whose firm helped craft Floyd’s album covers, is, in any case, chatting with his buddies and collaborators right here — with surreal allegoric scenes each trippy and dire. Barrett’s slide into acid casualty is heartbreaking, but the person was so singular that one has to name this cautionary story distinctive.

Have You Got It Yet? The Story of Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd
Not Rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters.