Sway

In the last days of the 1960s, the worlds of the Rolling Stones and Charles Manson accidentally converged at the razor's edge of an era.
Sway is the story of those two forces and how they became entwined. It is the story of the Rolling Stones - from their days beating out their new sound and their new identities in freezing apartments and tiny clubs - focusing on Brian Jones, the first leader of the group, and on his growing confusion and jealousy as his band changed into something else.
It is also the story of a young man named Bobby Beausoleil, a handsome drifter under a dangerous influence. Beausoleil was befriended by the filmmaker Kenneth Anger and appeared along with Mick Jagger in Anger's film Invocation of My Demon Brother. When the film premiered, Beausoleil had been charged with a murder committed under the deranged leadership of Charles Manson, in whose commune he had found a temporary home.
Sway dares to imagine these lives, moving from the innocence and glamour of the young Rolling Stones to the awful events of 1969 - Brian's drowning in his mansion's swimming pool, the murder of a fan at the Stones concert at Altamont, and the Manson murders. Zachary Lazar weaves these scenes from real lives together into a true but heightened reality, making superstars human and demons palpable and restoring mythic events to the scale of daily life.