The past decade or so has been a sobering realization that the great streaming experiment has mostly fallen short of viewers’ expectations when it comes to the promise of original cinematic programming. Beyond Scorsese and Lynch failing to secure financing from these services, it seems like each major streaming network is dumping new disposable features into their respective troughs every week, even with the occasional A-lister name attached.
Yet among all the cheap-entertainment romcoms and action fare we’ve seen an influx of highly engaging documentary films and series in recent years, many of which concern themselves with untold stories from within the music industry across various genres and time periods. From the profile of an elusive figure within The Rolling Stones’ orbit to an appropriate experimental approach to one of our time’s greatest innovative electronic musicians, here are our picks for 10 of 2024’s music docs with the greatest staying power.
Born Innocent: The Redd Kross Story
Like The Beach Boys, that other family band from Hawthorne, California, Jeff and Steven McDonald have lived a bizarre—and, at times, unbelievably nightmarish—life while pursuing their rock ’n’ roll dreams. Born Innocent, directed by Friends producer Andrew Reich, effectively chronicles the McDonalds’ rise from teenage punks to hard-rocking alt-rock trendsetters with interviews with the brothers, their parents, and their contemporaries, along with vintage performance clips and more. Perhaps the oddest tale is younger brother Steven’s kidnapping by an older female lover when he was a mere 13 years old. While sometimes the band’s kitschiness overshadows their pop brilliance, this film joyfully showcases Redd Kross’ 45-year legacy and importance to the Los Angeles scene and beyond. — Craig Rosen
Read our interview with the band exploring some of the LA spots that have defined their time in the city over the years here.
Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg
“I’ve been called a witch, a slut, and a murderer,” begins this documentary on Anita Pallenberg, a major but mysterious figure in the story of The Rolling Stones. The words are from an unpublished memoir, discovered after her death in 2017, and read here by an evocative Scarlett Johansson. It forms the backbone to this sometimes-glorious and often-sad story, from her rise as a counterculture superstar of the 1960s to her life of recurrent tragedy and chaos that followed. Pallenberg was a model-actress who briefly passed through Andy Warhol’s Factory before meeting the Stones in Munich in 1965. She was the inspiration behind several classic Stones tunes, and the model for Marianne Faithfull’s bleak “Sister Morphine.” As an actress, she had a promising start as the knife-twirling villain in Barbarella. After marrying Keith Richards, she gave that up for a family life that often went off the rails due to drug use. Her story unfolds here with the intimacy of a family photo album, at times horrifying and deeply moving, as directed by Alexis Bloom and Svetlana Zill. By the end, Richards concludes: “It was a hell of an experience. She made a man out of me.” — Steve Appleford
Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution
Whatever you think you know about disco, it’s not the complete story. The PBS docuseries Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution delves into this perennial genre in three hour-long, in-depth episodes. Director Grace Chapman explores disco’s nascence, rise, and purported demise in segments packed with never-before-seen archival footage and images. Balanced against these are talking heads from the last 50 years, including Colleen “Cosmo” Murphy, Scissor Sisters’ Ana Matronic, David Morales, and Honey Dijon. But no one is more colorful or provides a more detailed firsthand picture than longtime NYC DJ Nicky Siano. Disco’s origins in the Black and Brown gay clubs of that city are common knowledge, as is the Saturday Night Fever and Donna Summer era, but Disco puts its namesake into social, economic, cultural, and political context, delving far beyond a feel-good, surface-level examination. Disco might have faked its death at the infamous Disco Demolition Night at Chicago’s Comiskey Park, but it lives on, threaded through current pop and dance music, with no expiration date in sight. — Lily Moayeri
Eno
New York–based film director and photographer Gary Hustwit’s first documentary said it all about where his head is at, aesthetically speaking: 2007’s Helvetica and its then-50-year history of the titular typeface, which he followed up with the straight-faced Objectified in 2009 and Rams nearly a decade later, both films about urban design planning. That said, is the coolly linear Hustwit really the right guy to portray the music and art world’s mostly nonlinear, random-loving overlord of algebraic emotion and ambience? I think so. Mostly because Hustwit and his team set about utilizing a couture software program (Brain One, an anagram of “Brian Eno”) and generative tech that continues to choose footage, then edits and screens the Eno film differently each time. Culled from 30 hours of interviews and 500 hours of Eno-delivered archival footage, your Eno is not the same as my Eno, and will never be. In fact, I’m not certain of which Eno doc I’m actually recommending here with its 52 quintillion possibilities of what’s seen by each audience. And what’s more “Eno” than that? — A.D. Amorosi
The Greatest Night in Pop
Has there ever been a more momentous night in pop music than the evening Lionel Richie and Quincy Jones, aided by Bob Geldof, corralled superstars like Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, Cyndi Lauper, Diana Ross, Tina Turner, Huey Lewis, Bob Dylan, and Paul Simon together to record “We Are the World”? Bao Nguyen’s behind-the-scenes documentary The Greatest Night in Pop doesn’t think so. Almost three decades after this momentous occasion, it’s fascinating to see how the evening transpired and to hear Richie and Sheila E., among others, recount their experiences leading up to and during the night. Richie’s stories about writing the song with Jackson are priceless, as is Sheila E.’s uncensored explanation for her presence and Prince’s absence. The original footage from the evening is incomparable, and, in a pro move, Nguyen matched it up with a reporter from Life Magazine’s audio recording of the studio session. Best of all, The Greatest Night in Pop makes you feel like you were a fly on the wall of Henson Studios watching “We Are the World” being recorded. — Lily Moayeri
How Music Got Free
Based on the book by journalist Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free is a two-part series that explores the inception of peer-to-peer music sharing in the ’90s and the renegade online groups responsible for making it possible. Everyone knows about Napster, but only a few are aware of the computer-wiz teens led by the secretive leader known as Kali who took the relatively unknown MP3 format to develop a way to download whole albums onto a computer. The most surprising storyline in the film details how Dell Glover, a CD production plant manager who teamed up with the notorious online pirating group RNS, leveraged his access to unreleased albums to get access to secret online databases containing hundreds of pirated films, helping create the bootleg DVD industry that boomed during the 2000s. Director Alex Stapleton weaves a compelling documentary from start to finish, juggling many layers of backstory to create an engaging series focused as much on how these renegade online groups could get away with pirating for so long as the hapless record execs who couldn’t adapt to the times. — Juan Gutierrez
Lolla: The Story of Lollapalooza
As the charismatic frontman of Jane’s Addiction and Porno for Pyros, Perry Farrell definitely made his mark on the ’90s alternative rock scene. Yet his role as the founder of Lollapalooza, as illustrated in this three-part docuseries, may have been even more impactful. Lolla shows how Farrell and his partners channeled the spirit of Woodstock, updated it with some ’90s alt-rock angst, and took the show on the road with a mind-blowingly eclectic lineup. While eventually the traveling version crashed and burned, Lollapalooza re-emerged in 2005 as an annual event in Chicago with a more pop-centric flavor. This docuseries, with extensive interviews and live performance footage, is the next best thing to being there. — Craig Rosen
Omar and Cedric: If This Ever Gets Weird
Few musical partnerships are as intense onstage and off as that of Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodríguez-López. Best known for their bands At the Drive-In and The Mars Volta, they’re musical adventurers, a brotherhood of melody and noise. They met as punk-rock teens in El Paso, and grew to create wild spasms of sound that took hard rock into exciting new dimensions. As told in this dynamic if unconventional film, directed by Nicolas Jack Davies, their story is one of total commitment to the cause—and to one another. Impressionistic and skillfully edited, the film is built from a lifetime of personal video guitarist Rodríguez-López has compiled since childhood. There’s footage here of his earliest musical experiences, and raw behind-the-scenes moments of At the Drive-In teetering under pressure as their profile peaked with the careening radio hit “One-Armed Scissor.” There are creative highs and the lowest of lows, as when vocalist Bixler-Zavala veered into Scientology and cruelly pushed his friend away. This is deeply personal stuff, and will be a revelation to longtime fans. For everyone else, it’s still a meaningful tale of two friends with a lasting bond that’s as much musical as it is personal. — Steve Appleford
Pavements
Pavements isn’t the music biopic/documentary hybrid you might think it is—it’s never fully sincere, but never fully blasé, either. Director Alex Ross Perry’s vision for Pavements is a fascinating visual encapsulation of Pavement’s ethos as it combines Nathan Fielder’s deadpan humor and unsuspecting sincerity with Rob Reiner’s Spinal Tap–era meta humor. It’s both an interesting addition to Pavement’s oeuvre and a compelling postmodern work in its own right. The film climaxes with Pavement’s infamous Lollapalooza show in West Virginia in 1995, where they got pelted with mud by a disgruntled audience. This moment’s brilliance is how the film eschews the dramatic myth-making found in biopics like Bohemian Rhapsody to create something more refreshing. Pavements can feel a bit long for an experiment like this, but the strength of its performances, its meta-narrative, and its off-beat comedic moments makes it well worth the time. You also get appearances by Greta Gerwig, Snail Mail, Soccer Mommy, Kim Gordon, Speedy Ortiz, and Bully, which are an added bonus. — Juan Gutierrez
Stax: Soulsville, U.S.A.
One of the standout aspects of Jamila Wignot’s serial documentary on Jim Stewart’s Memphis-born label is how straightforward a tale the director tells. Like the sounds they put out to the planet (before R&B, Stax released rockabilly and country records in tune with Stewart’s fiddle-playing day job, and that of his church organist-turned-banker sister who became his partner in the venture) Stax: Soulsville, U.S.A. makes no muss or fuss is discussing the family-like players who reshaped both the label and the Song of the South. From jokey Rufus Thomas to stoic Otis Redding, from the grooving Booker T. Jones and his multiracial MGs to the smoldering cinematic Isaac Hayes and the holy-rolling Staple Singers, from bad deals and bankruptcies to gold records and a revived, revitalized label—with all of the tragedies of Redding’s early death and the labels’ new owners’ arrests for bank fraud in between—Stax is never portrayed as glamorously romantic as was, say, Gordy’s Motown or the Ertegun Brothers’ Atlantic. Stax had a gut-bucket birth and is lionized to this day, via Soulsville, U.S.A., for its rural, righteous brands of soul, blues, and funk. — A.D. Amorosi
