Jan Borysewicz, the Lady Pank guitarist who asked Netflix to keep his mistakes in

Jan Borysewicz

Photo: Mateusz Kopeć / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 17, 1955 Wrocław
Occupation	Musician
Awards	Złoty Fryderyk — lifetime achievement, with Lady Pank · Tokyo Music Festival — best composer, Minus Zero · Bursztynowy Słowik — lifetime achievement, with Lady Pank

Jan Borysewicz gave the makers of the film about his life one condition: leave the mistakes in. The guitarist who co-founded Lady Pank, and who wrote the music for almost every song the band has recorded, has let a debutant actor play him for Netflix at his most gifted and his most self-destructive, in a country where a rock concert could still end with a government ban. Few Polish musicians have been loved for as long, and few have tested that love as hard. The man who supplied the soundtrack to Poland’s last communist decade also came close to wrecking it in front of a stadium full of children, and he has spent the decades since playing his way back.

Jan Józef Borysewicz was born on April 17, 1955, in Wrocław and grew up in the city’s Sępolno district. His father, Michał, played drums in an amateur jazz band, and the boy first wanted to follow him behind the kit. Home grew harder fast. His mother developed multiple sclerosis when he was thirteen, and at sixteen he was working as a house painter to help keep the family afloat. His older brother, Andrzej, taught him his first guitar chords, from House of the Rising Sun. Andrzej later took his own life.

The talent showed early. At seventeen, spotted playing at a Wrocław cultural centre, he was invited to sit in with the rock group Nurt and played the show without a single rehearsal. He then spent months gigging in East Germany, where the British bluesman Alexis Korner offered him dates in West Germany and Britain; he declined, convinced he was not yet good enough. After several local bands he joined Budka Suflera in 1978 and wrote Nie wierz nigdy kobiecie, with words by Andrzej Mogielnicki, which became one of that band’s biggest hits. When the group shelved his other songs, he walked out, and Mogielnicki went with him.

His own band arrived almost by accident. In December 1981, during the recording of Izabela Trojanowska’s album Układy, he sang and played a song called Mała Lady Punk. It took off on the radio, and he spent the next year building a group around it, with Janusz Panasewicz brought in as the singer at Mogielnicki’s urging. They spelled the name Lady Pank so nobody would mistake them for punks. The debut album, Lady Pank, sent six songs to number one on Polish Radio Three’s chart, among them Kryzysowa narzeczona and Mniej niż zero, and that year a reader poll in the magazine Non Stop named Borysewicz the country’s top composer, singer and instrumentalist all at once. The sound was bright and modern for a record made in the shadow of martial law: a Stratocaster through a Boss chorus pedal and rhythm figures borrowed openly from The Police. In 1986 the English-language version, Minus Zero, won him the best composer award at the Tokyo Music Festival.

The same year showed the other side of the story. On June 1, 1986, at a Children’s Day concert at Wrocław’s Olympic Stadium, a drunk Borysewicz exposed himself on stage and swore back at hecklers in the crowd. The Ministry of Culture barred Lady Pank from concerts and broadcasts for the rest of the year. He was sentenced to three months’ arrest, waived under an amnesty. Mogielnicki ended the partnership and stayed away for sixteen years. Borysewicz has always said he was provoked, but the episode fits a longer pattern of shows played drunk or skipped altogether. The broadcaster Kuba Wojewódzki once called him the Polish Keith Richards, a label he rejects. A heart attack at thirty and a wine glass crushed during a hotel argument, which cut a tendon in his right thumb and forced him to rebuild his technique, belong to the same chapter. Netflix’s synopsis puts that chapter at the centre of the film, and it is the right call: the brightness of the early records sat next to a life that was close to coming apart.

Lady Pank broke up in 1991 and came back together in 1994, and all along Borysewicz kept a restless solo career going under the name Jan Bo. Królowa ciszy was an album of his own Christmas carols, written after a pilgrimage to Jasna Góra. Wojna w mieście, from 1992, was the opposite: a guitarist’s record full of Hendrix-style solos, and the first on which he wrote his own lyrics. Its track Lubię te noce was ranked third in TopGuitar magazine’s list of the best Polish guitar solos. More solo records followed, up to Kawa i dym in 2016. His most commercial side project was Borysewicz & Kukiz, a pop album with the singer Paweł Kukiz that sold close to 100,000 copies in 2003. He also played on Grzegorz Ciechowski’s Obywatel G.C. and recorded the soundtrack of the animated film O dwóch takich, co ukradli księżyc with Panasewicz, playing every instrument himself.

His body eventually set the terms. A second heart attack in 2005, a quad-bike crash in 2010 and further hospital stays led him to give up cigarettes, alcohol and drugs. In 2022 he told his story in Mniej obcy, an authorized biography written as a long conversation with the television host Marcin Prokop, that opened parts of his life he had kept quiet for decades. In September 2024 he sold 27 guitars from his collection at the Desa Unicum auction house in Warsaw. His red Stratocaster known as Łapka, marked with his daughter Alicja’s handprint, went for 250,000 złoty.

The reconciliation with Mogielnicki, who returned in 2002, is the thread running through the present. Mogielnicki worked with the band again on 45, the Lady Pank album released in November 2025 and trailed by the singles Motyle, Uciekaj, Kalifornia and Obok. When the band received a Golden Fryderyk for lifetime achievement in Warsaw in May 2026, Borysewicz used the moment to thank Mogielnicki as the band’s father. The 45th-anniversary tour had opened at Warsaw’s COS Torwar arena in March.

Then came the film. Less of a Stranger, released in Polish as Mniej obcy after the book, is a scripted drama directed by Kristoffer Rus, with the guitarist Mikołaj Bukrewicz in his first feature role as Borysewicz and Patryk Pietrzak as Mogielnicki. It premiered in the main competition of the Polish Film Festival in Gdynia in September, where it won the prize for visual effects, and reached Netflix worldwide on October 7, 2026. Borysewicz set the tone himself in Netflix’s announcement. “This is not a story about how it is worth blindly chasing your dreams,” he said. “It is more that if you really cannot give something up, you have to be ready to bear the consequences of your choices.”

He has been married three times and has two daughters, Joanna and Alicja. In 2025 he married his longtime partner, Małgorzata Burlewicz. At seventy-one he is still on stage with the band he built around one song in 1981. Lady Pank’s 45th-anniversary tour carries on, and for the first time a global audience is meeting the guitarist through an actor before it hears the songs themselves.