Review: The Doors (1991)

After the initial frame scene, of Jim Morrison drinking and reciting poetry in a dark recording studio, the title card, The Doors, flashes across a Southwestern desert. Director Oliver Stone then shows us a car, loaded with luggage on top, driving down a desert road towards distant mountains, with dark thunderclouds flashing lightning in the top right of the shot. Another title card informs us that this is “New Mexico 1949.” As the camera cuts to the interior of the car, showing the young parents driving, and a young “Jimmy” waking up in the back seat, we hear the Doors’ song, “Riders On the Storm” playing on the soundtrack.

Soon, the Morrison family’s car will pull past policemen and what looks like a bad accident between a pickup and a vehicle full with a Navajo family. Women are crying. An old Navajo man appears to be dead. Jim is arrested by the images as he looks through the back window.

Stone then cuts to a grown up Jim on the side of the road, hitchhiking, played by a young Val Kilmer (then in his early 30s). That’s all the backstory Stone provides, but it is more than enough to inform his portrayal of who Jim Morrison was.

Watching the rest of The Doors is like awaiting that coming storm, and seeing flashes of lightning, or illumination, in the distant looming darkness.

2025 is 34 years after the release of Oliver Stone’s biopic of the rockstar, Jim Morrison, and his era-defining time with the band, The Doors. (In spite of the title, it’s really a movie focused on Morrison and not the whole band.) 2025 is also 54 years after 1971, when Morrison was found dead in a bathtub due to heart failure, as the film informs us in the final titles.

With Val Kilmer’s passing in March 2025, the sense of the film’s death drive is only magnified. Not because Kilmer passed away at a young age (although still before his time) or due to similar reasons (for recent audiences, the effects of Kilmer’s battle with cancer were bravely on display in his final performance in 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick.)

Pulsing with electricity in the air and the occasional flash, The Doors remind us of several important aspects of American pop culture.

First, the film reminds us of the centrality of Jim Morrison to the image of the counterculture of the late 1960s and in the development of the rock star trope, especially with its motifs of drugs, sex, alcohol, and premature death. We see in Morrison’s interest in poetry and his self-serious self-conception as an artist who doesn’t want to “sell out,” as well as in his relative youth, connections between the figure of the 1960s counterculture pop artist and the early-19th century Romantic artist, such as Shelley and Lord Byron, who also died younger.

Second, the film reminds us of the immense talent of Val Kilmer as a performer. This is a great performance, while being one that also matches the conventions of what we have come to see as “prestige biopic” features. Kilmer was really known as a comedian before this. The role lets Kilmer go dark, while showing off his bodily transformation, from the lithe sex appeal of the shirtless Morrison most of us have seen on album and magazine covers into the bearded and bellied Morrison of his later days (but still remembering that he was only 27 when he died).

Made only twenty years after Morrison died, The Doors has a proximity to the events it portrays that is lacking in more recent musical biopics, which tend to have a much more distant and nostalgic view (such as 2004’s Ray, 2005’s Walk the Line, and 2024’s A Complete Unknown). Rather, The Doors is shaped by Stone’s obsession with the 1960s as the tumultuous decade of change in America, the era that formed everything since. In many respects, Stone reflects a Baby Boomer liberal’s view of the promises and failures of the counterculture and the various cultural revolutions of that period.

Third, The Doors is a reminder that Oliver Stone was at one point among the top American filmmakers, and that he has a filmography that few can rival. In many respects, most of Stone’s films could be read as part of an ongoing thematic project on America (see Anders’ essay on JFK). At the same time, and especially in the 1990s, Stone developed a project of formal experimentation, creating movies that relate complex storylines using a wide array of audio-visual markers to call attention to different forms of mediation. Stone’s form in The Doors is not as daring, not as revolutionary, as it would become—later that year with the intricate montages of JFK, with the hyper stylistic variations of Natural Born Killers (1994), and with parts of Nixon (1995).

Nevertheless, The Doors is not a conventional biopic, even though its structure goes through the usual plot expectations: of (brief) formative childhood experience; forming the band; the big break; the highs of success; and the downward spiral. All of that is familiar (although the redemption parts of Walk the Line and Ray are totally absent). But it is the film’s obsessive death drive, showing up in the motif of the dead old Navajo man, who hovers on the edges of Morrison’s vision throughout the film as the spectre of Jim’s first encounter with death. When he first meets Meg Ryan’s Pamela Courson, who later becomes his partner, he tells her about the appeal of death to him. Stone’s use of the death motif might be on-the-nose, but it’s a haunting dynamic in the movie.

There is also the film’s related visual motif of a recurring flashforward to the final image of Morrison in the tub, each flash giving us a little bit longer and fuller picture of what we are seeing. There is certainly a Freudian aspect to the themes, its paralleling of the sex drive with the death drive, of Eros with Thanatos.

While I was watching The Doors, I was strangely reminded of another biopic by another cinematic stylist that came out only three years ago: Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis. (See our podcast discussion of Elvis and other musical biopics.) Both film’s are conventional in certain respects, especially in their overarching story of rise and fall, but what I find distinct is their interest less in the artist and more in what the artist represents in our culture. Neither are true “fan films,” concerned primarily with remembering the music of The Doors or of Elvis Presley, even if some audiences turned to these films for that reason. Nor are they simply about how each figure changed music. Rather, the two films hold up these rock stars as agents and vehicles of change, figures driven by larger forces, which ultimately destroy them and irrevocably change the culture. There is a reason Stone’s script has Morrison bring up Dionysis at different points in the film. These are musical biopics less about the music, and more about the symbol of the man.

The Doors might also be illustrative for the latest generation, similarly preoccupied with many musicians and artists consumed by their desires and their seeming drives towards self-destruction, to see that all of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.

7 out of 10

The Doors (USA, 1991)

Directed by Oliver Stone; written by J. Randal Johnson and Oliver Stone; starring Val Kilmer, Meg Ryan, Kevin Dillon, Kyle MacLachlan, Frank Whaley, Michael Madsen, Billy Idol, and Kathleen Quinlan.

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