Have You Never Heard of Bill Fuller?      Director: David BurkeCert: NoneStarring: Kate Fuller, Jane Fuller, Adam Clayton, Suggs, Sam Smyth, Michael Mary MurphyRunning Time: 1 hr 22 minsWell, no, I don’t think I ever have heard of Bill Fuller. After watching David Burke’s fascinating – sometimes frustrating – documentary on the Kerry-born entrepreneur, I feel slightly ashamed of myself. Few 20th century Irish lives were so flushed with achievement. Urban builder, ballroom mogul, music manager, gold prospector, he lived the sort of epic life that might provide Paul Thomas Anderson with material for a three-hour feature. Yet he doesn’t even have his own Wikipedia page. We are all dust in the wind.Told in lively non-linear fashion, the film begins with Suggs from Madness talking us through Camden Town’s journey from down-at-heel flatland to the trendiest spot in North London. He is among several identifying The Electric Ballroom, one of Fuller’s venues, as a key meeting place for the post-punk generation. By that stage, Fuller had already lived several enormous lives. Born in 1917 to a farming family, he moved to London in the mid-1930s and set to working on building sites, ultimately becoming a contractor. After the war, he profited greatly from the race to rebuild. Ballrooms followed as the showband scene blossomed in Ireland and American acts returned to England. Somewhere in here, Fuller discovered Carmel Quinn, a Dublin-born singer, took her to America, married her and made her into a genuine star. Buoyed by his wife’s fame, he went on to book acts such as Patsy Cline, Jerry Lee Lewis, Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash.This barely gets us halfway through the story. Fuller acted as bailsman for IRA suspects in the 1970s. The complex story of his offering financial assistance to the defendant in a notorious Las Vegas murder case defies easy summary. One imagines there is a separate documentary to be made about his gold interests alone.Burke has peopled his film with charismatic talking heads. Adam Clayton credits Fuller’s ownership of McGonagle’s, a rightly legendary venue off Grafton Street, with keeping the Irish music scene alive. The reliably cordial journalist Sam Smyth raises eyebrows at other scarcely believable achievements.Yet we end the film profoundly puzzled as to what drove Bill Fuller. Repeated shots from John Wayne movies remind us that he identified with the frontier spirit. But nobody here can quite make sense of a man who repeatedly made impossibilities collapse before his indomitable, eccentric will. An intriguing head-scratcher of a film.On limited release from August 7th