Step into the Wayback Machine, if you will, to the early ‘80s. If you were a tween or teen girl during those years, there was a lot of neon on everything…by choice. Swatch watches, friendship bracelets, and blue eyeshadow were everyday decisions. If you liked music and haunted the aisles of your local Sam Goody, Tower Records or Wherehouse Music, there’s a pretty good chance that you were swept into the raging estrogen tide known as Wham-mania.
Dear reader, I am one of those tweens. I admit to being a victim to the Brit charms of Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou (AKA George Michael) and Andrew Ridgeley who together were the band known as Wham!. Their smiling faces graced my bedroom walls, I bought their Fantastic album on tape as an import (the costs!) and literally wore out the spine of a glossy Wham! collector’s magazine (print!) that I read over and over and over. Did I even memorize some of the copy inside? …Perhaps. Gratefully, the madness lasted a brief four years—from 1982 to 1986—which coincides with the entire lifespan of Wham! as a band. However, if you lived it in real time, that era remains a heady, gauzy place where we could pin our teen fantasies on those two hot guys from England, as we cooed over their their odd penchant for athleisure wear, confusing “Choose Life” shirts and Christmas song we still play to this day. It was easy to ignore what was percolating under the proverbial boot of their actual lives until George Michael went solo, came out and became an even bigger superstar.
If that time means anything to you, then Netflix’s documentary Wham! by director Chris Smith (Fyre, Tiger King) is like a time capsule for your soul. A tight yet thorough timeline of Wham!’s creation, meteoric ascension and then abrupt ending, Wham! uses the archival recordings of Michael and more recent recorded musings of Ridgeley to tell their story from their perspectives. Supported with home videos, television programs, concert footage and, blessedly, Mrs. Ridgeley’s 50 scrapbooks filled with clippings, photos and materials that document every major moment in the band’s history. All of it makes for an intimate exploration of their childhood friendship that remained tight all the way through their global glory selling 30 million records worldwide.
For those who prefer their docs to include on-camera subjects, Wham! follows the path of recent docs that rely heavily on audio interviews. But Smith’s choice to only feature the voices of Michael and Ridgeley as narrators isn’t disappointing even though it’s a rigid, single lane of perspective. It works because the director has Michael (who passed away at age 53 in 2016) on tape speaking in detail about his deeply important friendship with Ridgeley, his personal transition from shy kid to bold performer and his frank assessments of his choice to hide his sexuality from the public and media. That material and Smith’s technique means he can wisely use Ridgeley’s current interviews to gently dovetail and counterpoint those Michael interviews to expand on memories or provide some clarifications. In that way, the audio is framed like a conversation where the two friends could be in the same room reminiscing, which adds a lot of emotional depth to the bedazzled existence of their band life.