Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell

It's official: Variety reports that Elijah Wood will play Iggy Pop in an upcoming biopic called "The Passenger," to be directed by Nick Gomez. As they say in the funny papers, "Aiieeee!"

This may, in fact, turn out to be a good movie. More likely it's the first sign of the apocalypse. I like Wood, and I understand his desire to break out of the box that childhood adorability and "The Lord of the Rings" put him in. He's been trying to get this movie off the ground for two years, so obviously he's committed. And yet, and yet, and yet -- you're gonna have to prove it to me, Frodo.

And it's not going to be easy: Wood has the most soulful eyes in the business, and the former James Newell Osterberg -- leader of The Stooges, primogenitor of punk, and perhaps the most gleefully unhinged of rock's bad boys -- arguably has no soul. Unlike Jim Morrison or Ray Charles or any other rock great whose life has been poured into a Hollywood container, there's no psychological backstory (that we know of, anyway), no demons, no artistic mission, nothing to "explain" why the Ig felt it necessary to cut his chest with broken bottles in concert back in the late 60s and pour every bit of unholy midwestern voodoo he could muster into songs like "TV Eye". He simply is. The average rock movie is often about the perils of ego, but how do you make one about a guy who's all id? And how do you convince us Elijah Wood is that guy?

On another front, this marks the point where the wave of rock biopics finally starts to wash over the punk generation. Thirty years ago it was "The Buddy Holly Story," fifteen years ago "The Doors," now this. When Katie Holmes gets cast as Patti Smith, please kill me.