Marianne Faithfull Recalls Taking LSD with Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan ‘Coming on to Me’

“Feed your head,” Grace Slick sang at the end of “White Rabbit,” the 1967 Top 10 hit by the San Francisco psychedelic rock band Jefferson Airplane that used Alice’s adventure in Wonderland as a metaphor for an acid trip.

Her British contemporary Marianne Faithfull was more direct: “Please, Sister Morphine, turn my nightmares into dreams,” she sang on “Sister Morphine,” a song about “what it might be like to be an addict” that she cowrote with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones.

Faithfull’s record label withdrew the release of her original rendition of “Sister Morphine” after three days in 1969. (A woman singing about drugs? What horror!) Two years later, a cover by the Stones became a classic on their landmark 1971 album Sticky Fingers. And so it went for iconoclastic women in rock in the 1960s.

Now, better late than never, a full half-century after she released her first album — and exactly seven months after her death on Jan. 30, 2025, at age 78 — Marianne Faithfull is finally getting her due.

The British singer-songwriter and actress best known by many as Mick Jagger’s glamorous girlfriend in the late ’60s gets the full documentary treatment with Broken English, a film named after her classic 1979 album that premieres on Aug. 30 at the Venice Film Festival.

The movie is a long-time-coming tribute to Faithfull, who scored four U.K. Top 10 and U.S. Top 40 hits between November 1964 and the summer of 1965 and recorded 21 studio albums, but whose work during the British Invasion and beyond was largely overshadowed by the company she kept (the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Bob Dylan…).

The film, directed by Jane Pollard and Iain Forsyth, is set up like an extended episode of This is Your Life, with Oscar-winning actress Tilda Swinton serving as a sort of master of ceremonies. Faithfull is interviewed by actor George MacKay and shown clips from various interviews throughout the course of her career, while guest artists perform her songs. Beth Orton covers “As Tears Go By” (Faithfull’s first, biggest and best-known hit, from 1964, co-written by Jagger and Richards), Suki Waterhouse tackles “Sister Morphine,” and Courtney Love, accompanied by Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and members of Portishead and My Bloody Valentine, crushes “Time’s Square.”

Faithfull’s music gets the reverence it deserves, but, of course, the company she kept gets ample screen time. Early on, a vintage clip from director D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 Bob Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back is shown in which Bob Dylan types while sitting next to a 19-year-old Faithfull as she sings a song on the soundtrack.

In the present day, MacKay asks Faithfull — who is wearing a white button-down shirt and black tie, with oxygen tubing attached to her nose — what it was like to be in that room.

“A lot of tension,” she says. “He was coming on to me. There was Joan [Baez]. I worshipped her. Bob said to me, ‘I’ve been writing poem about you.’ That’s what he was typing. Well, it was probably completely made up. If I had a dollar for every cute man who’s told me, ‘This song, this poem is about you, darling, I’d be rich.’ ”

“Who were some of the others?” MacKay wonders.

“I can’t remember,” Faithfull cheekily responds.

Perhaps one was her first husband, artist John Dunbar, who makes a surprise appearance in the flesh. Or Mick Jagger, for whom Faithfull served as a prominent muse into the ’70s. The Rolling Stones frontman pops up, too, although in name and vintage clips only.

An old interview where she talks about chaos and anarchy is shown, followed by Faithfull’s reaction to her pronouncements decades later. “The night before I did this interview, Mick and I had taken LSD, and maybe that affected me,” she tells MacKay. “But I think that some of my opinions and all that caused a lot of trouble — that I talked too much, too openly, and eventually what happened was that they came down on us.”

What happened was a 1967 police raid on Keith Richards’ house, where a nude Faithfull (she was wearing nothing but a fur rug when the cops busted in) became the center of the media coverage. “It never occurred to me that the powers that be would ever do something like that, walk into Keith’s house and arrest us,” she says, adding, “I think Mick worried. He was quite straight…. I really was like that [a rock & roll rebel]. I was very anarchic.”

Broken English is not all about the men. Faithfull also discusses her creative process (“Sister Morphine” started as a “lovely tune” that Mick was annoyingly playing around the house all the time that she decided to write lyrics for), sexism, addiction, a suicide attempt and aging. “I hate what’s happened,” she says, referring to the health issues that plagued her during her final years.

“Marianne died before we could finish this,” Swinton announces toward the end of Broken English. “But before she left us, she did manage to record a music performance. We weren’t to know at the time that this would be her last performance ever made.”

“Our fearless friend is gone,” she continues. “Gone and not forgotten.”

Then Faithfull, without her breathing tubes, makes one final appearance to perform her 2018 song “Misunderstanding,” accompanied by Australian singer-songwriter Nick Cave on piano and backup vocals. “Love is real,” she sings. “Love is here. The only thing I know for sure. Love last longer. Have no fear. Only you have such allure. Only you have such allure.”