Tribeca Film Festival this year featured a long list of compelling documentaries about music. Here are reviews of four of them, all featuring rock stars who are now of a certain age:
Counting Crows: Have You Seen Me Lately?
Adam Duritz is 60 years old. Which I guess makes sense, since the Counting Crows frontman has been famous for more than 30 years, although he looks a lot younger than that.
He’s the primary interview subject in this Tribeca world premiere, which looks back on Counting Crows’ mid-1990s rise. The “August and Everything After” hit in 1994, bringing this San Francisco band into major prominence in the post-grunge era. It also catapulted Duritz to instant fame, and into a series of high-profile romances (he dated both Rachel and Monica).
Directed by Amy Scott, the film follows Counting Crows for those few years in the 1990s, when Duritz headed to L.A., worked for a time as a bartender, and recorded the (in my opinion, even better) follow-up album, Recovering the Satellites, in 1997.
Duritz, of course, ended up troubled, and reveals that he battled not addiction or alcoholism, but rather mental illness. The film also establishes that Counting Crows’ music was very polarizing, although that’s not quite fair, the band had some real bangers. And while the doc doesn’t focus on any of the band’s music after ’97, it establishes that the band still tours and records today, and Duritz seems to have landed in a good place mentally.
Part of HBO’s Music Box series, the film makes a bunch of great choices, including ’90s aesthetics everywhere! Handwritten on-screen captions. CDs and VHS tapes. Those who remember this era are really in for a treat.
Have You Seen Me Lately lands on HBO at some point later this year.
Boy George & Culture Club
Boy George is 64 years old. I’d have guessed he was older than Duritz by more, since his heyday started a decade before Duritz’s.
This entertaining but relatively straightforward new documentary was made by Alison Ellwood, who directed The History of the Eagles. Unlike that film, the band members aren’t quite at each other’s throats in the present day, although unlike Culture Club, there were no former couples among the Eagles.
The English band exploded in the Reagan/Thatcher era, led by the extremely flamboyant Boy George, and it’s clear that both being coy about sexuality, and trolling everyone who asked about it, was a key part of what the band was up to back in the day―and also, that they were having the time of their life with it.
“In a country that has Liberace I’m hardly revolutionary, am I?,” he says in one vintage interview.
The latter part gets into Boy George’s somewhat scary heroin addiction, although he came out the other side and continues to perform today.
There’s no word on release for the film.
Billy Idol Should Be Dead
Billy Idol is 67 years old. But the rock star whose heyday was the ‘80s has lived, it’s fair to say, a harder life than either of the men above.
Jonas Åkerlund’s also fairly straightforward portrait of Idol traces his career from the punk era in Britain to his solo run, which coincided with the start of the MTV era. There’s also a great deal about Idol’s complex relationship with his father.
Throughout, Idol was doing a lot of drugs and a lot of womanizing, and — per the title — he had a number of near-death experiences, including various drug adventures at the height of his fame, as well as a major motorcycle accident. He also never really got the movie career he wanted, despite some near-misses, including a screen test to play the Robert Patrick part in Terminator 2.
By the end, Idol is suddenly a doting grandfather, although he still performs, including a tour later this year.
There’s no word on a release date.
Oh Yeah!
Dieter Meier and Boris Blank, the two members of the band Yello, are 80 and 73 years old, respectively.
Yello is the band behind “Oh Yeah!,” a quintessential song from the 1980s that’s best known for appearing in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. It’s also the subject of an 18-minute short, directed by Nick Canfield, about the history of the band — who had surprising punk rock roots — and the song.
It debuted at Tribeca as part of a shorts program called Shorts: Embrace the Music.
