Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Brian Eno comes from a long line of communications professionals — postmen, in fact. This excellent nugget is just one of many in Eno, a spry docu-biography of a figure of vast cultural influence and oddly uncertain skillset. A passport application would probably say musician and artist. Still, many people have wondered down the years: what is it exactly that Eno does?Fittingly, an early scene finds him recalling the thrill of first hearing The Silhouettes’ 1957 doo-wop classic “Get a Job”. (He was nine, in rural Suffolk, east England.) From there, director Gary Hustwit toggles insightfully between CV highlights and the evolution of what we might call a serial rethinker. The career history begins in the early 1970s with Roxy Music, where the synthesiser was a perfect fit for an art-school dandy with free-range ideas but no musical background: an instrument so new you could make up how to play it. A solo career followed, alongside the role of producer for, among others, David Bowie, with whom he made the “Berlin trilogy”; Talking Heads, who he introduced to the jitter of Afrobeat; and U2, who we see being guided into the commercial juggernaut of 1987’s The Joshua Tree.If all that only leads to the further mystery of what record production involves, the film shows us Eno as a cerebral presence whose creative magic could, perhaps, be framed as a single, open-ended provocation: What if? Where ordinary musical minds might talk of chord progressions, here we hear a fascinating mini-lecture on the eyesight of frogs.But the charm of the film is how lightly this knowledge is worn, shared in a spirit of brevity and fun. In his ambient phase, music critics turned on him, using “Eno-esque” as an insult. The movie triumphantly reclaims the term, embodying it in form as well as content. On release in the UK, every showing will see scenes reordered so that no two screenings are ever quite the same. It’s a bold and playful touch, Eno-esque in the very best sense.★★★★☆In UK cinemas from July 12
