But Performance’s achievement was about far more than style. On paper (and in script form), it’s easy to understand why Warner Bros. might greenlight the picture: With Jagger and Fox on board (the latter role was first conceived for Marlon Brando), the cast alone made it a sure thing. And who were they to expect what the filmmakers had in store?

By rejecting studio sets to shoot on location in London, Cammell and Roeg freed themselves from Warner Bros.’ controlling oversight. Shot in sequence, the first half followed the script and resembled a standard gangster picture, with Fox playing an underworld “performer,” the hired muscle crime bosses sent in to intimidate their business associates (the depiction was inspired in part by London’s notorious Kray twins). But as filming progressed, they drifted from the script to create a more transgressive story, improvising as they went.

The movie not only melts the boundaries between characters (most notably melding Fox’s ambiguously gay gangster, Chas, with Jagger’s free-loving rocker, Turner) but also the very structure of the film itself. Performance reflects the psychedelic mindset of the late-’60s “swinging London” pictures, but also feels — to the sober mind, at least — as if the film is disintegrating before your eyes. It feels that way in part because Performance literally was falling apart (or together, depending on how generous your perspective) as Cammell and Roeg made it.

The dailies terrified the studio. Once Chas (Fox’s character) reaches Turner’s flat (where Jagger enters the picture), the movie veered into the territory of a sexually amorphous, drug-laced hallucination, featuring explicit lovemaking (often in threes — something of a fixation for Cammell) so risqué that the lab responsible for developing the film threatened to destroy the negative.

Warner Bros.-Seven Arts studio head Ken Hyman (whom Cammell knew from school) was apoplectic when he saw the first cut. The movie was a mess, the star (Mick Jagger) didn’t show up until halfway in and the sex scenes guaranteed an X rating. The picture was a moral outrage, celebrating deviance without consequences. Hyman so hated what he saw, he threatened never to release the film. Dejected, Roeg went off to make Walkabout in Australia while Cammell moved to Los Angeles to recut the picture.

When you take into consideration the amount of off-camera sex and drugs that went into the making of Performance, it was probably a good thing that Cammell was force to revise his initial offering. No doubt, certain concepts were neutered in the process, but what survived was still an incredibly subversive movie, finally released in August 1970. American audiences rejected the film, but it was embraced in England, where its artistic impact was most keenly felt.

From its opening moments, Performance is a confrontational experience, intercutting shots of a black Rolls Royce driving down a country road with a very fleshy sex scene. No obvious connection exists between the two images — which is so often the case throughout the film that I personally prefer not to invest too much time in deciphering the directors’ meaning. The way it was assembled, Peformance teeters on the brink of the avant garde: It very nearly sacrifices conventional plotting altogether in order to experiment with the juxtaposition of certain clips.

Cut-to-cut, does it really matter what Performance means, or should we take the film as a whole? The film reflects the obsessions of both its creators, not to mention the personal lives of its cast. Jagger was commenting on bandmate Brian Jones, whose own house inspired Turner’s lair and whose real-life love interest (Anita Pallenberg) was shagging Turner on-screen, even as he satirizes his own Redlands drug bust. A reportedly straight, upper-class Harrow boy, Fox was quite the opposite of his on-screen persona, adding another level of performance to the role.

In the film, the two characters trade places, or at least come to assume one another’s identities to such a degree that the final shot (which also takes place in a Rolls Royce, this time white) suggests that Chas has become Turner. What does it mean? A better question might be, what does it matter? From Eastern mysticism to the ideas of Jorge Luis Borges, with nods to Jean Cocteau and Kenneth Anger, Performance is so heavily layered with references to philosophy, art, literature, film and pop culture that interpretation confounds. Besides, Cammell and Roeg appear to be more interested in impressions anyhow.

According to MacCabe’s book, a passage late in the script reveals, “Something in Chas has changed. Perhaps, though, his screwed up ego would refuse to face the fact that for a while anyway, he is not trying to demonstrate that he is ‘nothing but a man.’ Perhaps he has realised that these three people are not concerned with the dramatic and pathetic problems of gender that rot the human race … that they don’t waste their lives and loves trying to define their sexes.”

The film subverts so much — class distinctions, gangster movies, gender roles, straight culture and, of course, cinema itself — but it is the sexual undercurrent that still seems most dangerous. At the end of what would have been the film’s first half (Chas’ underworld backstory was shortened to get to Turner’s character faster, and random shots of Jagger spray-painting his walls were introduced so audiences would feel his presence early on), Chas shoots an ex-lover, effectively killing off the evidence of an earlier homosexual affair.

The film’s climax repeats the gesture, this time with Jagger as his new impossible partner, and whatever we make of Performance’s enigmatic final image, there’s no question that the movie has lived up to Jagger’s line: “The only performance that makes it, that really makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness.”

Though the X has been softened to an R, Performance remains controversial by today’s standards. The movie has been out of print on video for so long, I’d nearly given up hope in seeing it ever released on DVD, although I confess that part of me had been hoping the Criterion Collection might embrace it, since they’ve fostered a relationship with Roeg (restoring his 1976 film, The Man Who Fell to Earth, in which Roeg directed David Bowie’s screen debut) and would no doubt fill it with valuable extras.

Imagine my surprise when Warner Bros. (the very studio that had once threatened to bury the film) unlocked its vaults and decided to release Performance on DVD. Though light on extras, the disc includes a new “Influence and Controversy” featurette, which does a decent job of putting the film in context via recent interviews with Pallenberg, editor Anthony Gibbs and Cammell’s brother David. Now you can judge for yourself just how daring and dangerous a film Performance truly is.