Sublime Can’t Fill the Void

A hit band inevitably winds up with a video compilation, but Sublime’s turn comes too late. Without singer Bradley Nowell--dead of a 1996 heroin overdose two months before the subsequently huge-selling “Sublime” album came out--the directors of four of the six treatments seen on this 25-minute “home video” had to patch together scenarios without a real rock star. Literal-mindedness dominates, as songs’ story lines are simply mimed by actors, with patched-together archival shots filling the gaps.

The Monkees-like cavort through “Santeria” is fun and puts the spotlight properly on surviving Sublimers Bud Gaugh and Eric Wilson. But its beatification of Nowell, seen in a shimmering, angelic image, is a bit much. Interview snippets project Nowell as upbeat, talkative and enthusiastic; he had other public moods.

Ultimately, the videos are most striking for what they reveal about the bodily changes a junkie goes through (Nowell is pudgy in the “Date Rape” clip from 1995; withered-looking elsewhere). His wife once described Nowell’s Dalmatian, Louie, as “Brad’s alter ego,” and the photogenic pooch is left to be just that, a spotted stand-in for a posthumous star.

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