70 Greatest Music Documentaries of All Time

At the time of its release, this documentary of U2’s Joshua Tree tour was lambasted for its overly reverent, self-important tone. Now with hindsight, Rattle and Hum can be seen properly as a honest portrait of the Irish quartet, whose holy quest was to change the world through rock & roll. Allow the band’s piousness and Americana obsessions to turn you off, and you’ll miss an intriguing look at a band adjusting to a global superstar status they haven’t relinquished since. And goddamn, is that Bono is one charming sonuvabitch! TG

Filmmaker Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) hangs out with three generations of innovative guitarists — Jimmy Page, the Edge, Jack White — to discuss their instrument and, more crucially, their approach to it. The jam session at the end is enjoyable enough, but It Might Get Loud‘s greatest pleasure is its awestruck, probing curiosity about how only six strings and a handful of chords can become so endlessly liberating and cathartic in the right hands. —T.G.

Machine-gun drumming, warp-speed guitar strumming, screamed lyrics about politics, punk ethics and personal alienation — this is hardcore, and Paul Rachman’s doc traces the underground movement’s ebbs and flows in places like D.C., L.A. and N.Y.C. throughout the Eighties. More than just a musical idea of stripping rock down to its bare necessities and brutalizing what was left, hardcore midwifed positive lifestyle templates (see straight-edge), a strong sense of community and an alpha-thug notion that violence was an inherent part of the show/scene; to his credit, Rachman looks at the good, the bad and the ugly of it all, as well as getting major players (Ian MacKaye, Keith Morris, Greg Ginn) to weigh in. It’s worth its weight in old Xeroxed gig flyers. —D.F.

A sociological study of headbangers, this 17-minute short consists of interviews with Judas Priest fans tailgating outside a Maryland show. Directors John Heyn and Jeff Krulik emphasize their subjects’ party-hearty, shit-faced shenanigans, but while it’s tempting to mock these mullet-afflicted metalheads, there’s an undeniable sweetness that permeates this mini-documentary. These kids may occasionally be inarticulate, sexist and obnoxious, but their innocent quest for rock & roll kicks is unfiltered youth personified. —T.G.

Filmmaker Dave Markey’s tour diary opens with an image of Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore freestyling bad poetry as his then-wife and bandmate Kim Gordon and Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain do a windmill dance on a railroad track — not a bad metaphor for indie-rock’s then-precarious, soon-to-be-apocalyptic arrival into the pop mainstream. The Year That Punk Broke follows Sonic Youth, Nirvana, the Ramones, Dinosaur Jr., Babes in Toyland and Gumball on a 1991 festival tour across Europe, capturing fantastic performances before rapturous outdoor crowds, with Moore’s self-shot video footage offering a revealing, funny, and sometimes kinda gross glimpse of their European vacation. It started as a sort of extended home movie, and ended up capturing a specific moment right before everything changed forever. —J.D.

The Ramones may be one of the most important punk bands in history, but as Jim Fields and Michael Gramaglia’s 2003 documentary reveals, they didn’t have many happy moments throughout their two-decade saga. That’s because they never had anything resembling a hit single, they never managed to rise above the dingy club circuit, and they absolutely despised each other. End of the Century delves into all of the drama, including Dee Dee’s heroin addiction, Joey’s battle with OCD, Johnny marrying Joey’s ex-girlfriend Linda, and their inability to make peace even when Joey was dying of lymphoma. All four original Ramones sat for new interviews, and it adds a layer of sorrow to a film that’s already built around frustration and acrimony to note that all four original members have passed on. Thanks to this, however, we are left with the definitive account of their story. —A.G.

Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam and director Steven Loveridge go way back to their art-school days, long before world tours and boom-boom-boom-take-your-mon-eyyy choruses (both of them wanted to be filmmakers, in fact). So when he pitched the idea of doing a movie about her, the Tamil immigrant-turned-global rap-pop juggernaut said yes. She gave him some tapes. He disappeared for five years. And when he finally premiered the end result, it was something completely different than your usual tour bus confessional or highlight reel of in-studio “Eureka! moments and live performances. Delving into the singer’s past, her political belief and trying to hold on to her identity while the pop-music media machine kicks into high gear (yes, there will be a mention of truffle fries), Matangi/Maya/M.I.A. focuses less on the musician behind hits like “Paper Planes” and “Galang” and more on the person who found herself in the middle of a maelstrom. It’s rough, raw and endlessly fascinating. —D.F.

On August 1st, 1971, George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Ringo Starr, Ravi Shankar, Billy Preston, Leon Russell, and Badfinger came together for a pair of shows at Madison Square Garden to raise money for the people of Bangladesh, who were facing a devastating humanitarian crisis due to the Bangladesh Liberation War and the aftermath of a brutal cyclone. The shows were packed with historic moments, like Bob Dylan’s first major public performance since his 1966 motorcycle accident and Harrison breaking out Beatles classics like “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and “Here Comes The Sun” to a live audience for the very first time. Bigger benefits like Live Aid would come years later, but this initial melding of music, activism and charity was what set the template — and fortunately, director Saul Swimmer captured all of it for this documentary. Despite technical mishaps that made some of the original footage unusable, it’s still a stunning, you-are-there testament to the spirit of those days.  —A.G.

By 1978, punk rock, new wave and disco were ascendant, and most Sixties rock icons were acts were already coasting on nostalgia. One very large exception: Neil Young. He’d just recorded a near-perfect collection of new songs called Rust Never Sleeps that raged against the idea of growing old gracefully, and even lashed out at his former CSNY bandmates for trying to hold him back. (“So I got bored and left them there,” he sings on “Thrasher.” “They were just dead weight to me.”) He took the music on the road with Crazy Horse and filmed a gig at San Francisco’s Cow Palace for this concert movie. It captures Young at the peak of his live powers as he thrashes out porto-grunge tunes like “Welfare Mothers, ‘”Sedan Delivery,” and “Hey Hey, My My (Into The Black).” In between songs, stage announcements from Woodstock are played, and roadies come onto the stage dressed like Jawas from Star Wars. It’s weird, wonderful, and a the documentation of a moment in Young’s career that he’s never been quite able to repeat. —A.G.

Leonard Cohen super fans were aware that a documentary was shot on his 1972 European tour, but for decades it was only seen via low-fi bootlegs taken from a German television broadcast in the Seventies.The raw footage sat in the vaults until 2009, when director Tony Palmer was given the opportunity to cut it into the movie he’d always envisioned. It begins with a riot during a gig in Tel Aviv at the end of the tour, before winding its way through a number of unforgettable fly-on-the-backstage-wall moments: Cohen dealing with extremely pushy fans, a litany of technical problems nearly shutting down one show, an exchange with a female fan that seems extremely eager to get to know him on a more intimate level. Throughout it all, Cohen remains stoic, wise, and the coolest person in any room he enters. —A.G.

His name was Chesney Henry Baker, though some called him the James Dean of jazz or the “Prince of Cool,” thanks to the clean, relaxed, hipper-than-hip sound he helped pioneer on his 1950s records. Mostly, this movie-star handsome trumpeter answered to “Chet,” and his life was a mixture of musical highs, lowlife company, late nights and a serious heroin habit that ended up derailing his career. Photographer-turned-documentarian Bruce Weber’s black-and-white look at the cool-jazz legend is almost as gorgeous as the subject himself, lending a throwback sheen to the proceedings that makes it feel like you’re watching a William Claxton album cover come to life. Claxton is, in fact, one of the various folks attesting to Baker’s greatness here, while Weber’s pals Chris Isaak, Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers and model Lisa Marie hang out to keep Chet company. The movie toggles between vintage clips of the man in his prime and the beautiful wreck he was in the late 1980s, after years of addiction and hard living had aged him. It’s a portrait of artist as a self-destructive supernova. —D.F.

When Kathleen Hanna went to a workshop held by playwright/novelist Kathy Acker, she declared that she wanted to be a writer because she had so many things to say, but no one ever listened to her. You should be in a band then, the author told her — so Hanna took her advice, started the legendary punk group Bikini Kill, and the rest is rebel-girl-you’re-the-queen-of-my-world history. Sini Anderson’s doc deservedly gives the singer-songwriter-activist-icon the spotlight, starting with those early, confrontational shows challenging the sexist status quo and moving into Hanna’s part in the seminal D.I.Y. Riot Grrrl movement, the formation of electroclash provocateurs Le Tigre and how she’s influenced generations of women to speak and/or scream their truth. It also gets into the way that she became a hate-magnet for neanderthals threatened by her ability to stand up for herself and her fellow females, and how health problems in 2006 essentially sidelined her from performing for years. Nevertheless, Hanna persisted. This is what a revolutionary looks like. —D.F.

For decades after it was filmed, Leon Russell expressed displeasure with Les Blank’s documentary, which caught the singer-songwriter at the peak of his carnival-showman powers and popularity in the early Seventies. As a result of Russell’s reaction, as well as music clearance issues, A Poem Is a Naked Person wasn’t officially released until 41 years after it was finished. But other than a scene in which Russell gets annoyed when someone ventures to guess his age, it’s hard to see why he might have objected. The 89-minute doc puts you right in the middle of Leon’s rock-the-gospel live shows as well as casual recording sessions singing country songs, and its depictions of life on the rock road are revealing of its time (drugs, hangers-on) without being too unsavory. —D.B.

When filmmaker Murray Lerner showed up at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival, he had no idea he’d be capturing Bob Dylan at the very moment he emerged as a superstar. And when the documentarian returned two years later, he was equally unaware that he was about to witness the very moment when Dylan betray his folk audience by plugging in and playing loud rock and roll. And while the shadow of one of the greatest songwriters in history looms very large over Lerner’s 1967 film on the Newport Folk Festival (not to mention the legacy of the festival itself), the movie also features stunning performances by everybody from Johnny Cash and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band to Son House, Howlin’ Wolf, and Mississippi John Hurt. Lerner and his team caught every last moment of it, making Festival both a priceless historic artifact and one of the great music docs of its day.  —A.G.

Meet the voices behind the voices: Morgan Neville’s doc on backup singers shines the spotlight on those golden-throated goddesses who too often get left out of the story. Listening to legends like Darlene Love and Lisa Fischer (between the two of them, they’ve graced hits by everyone from the Ronettes to Sinatra and Sting) talk of their experiences adding textures and harmonies, you feel like a secret chapter of rock history has been unlocked. The highlight is Merry Clayton recounting the recording “Gimme Shelter”; the sound of her voice breaking over an isolated vocal track will still make your hair stand on end. —D.F.

When Fred Armisen, Seth Meyers, and Bill Hader were looking for parody fodder for their TV show Documentary Now, Allison Ellwood’s two-part look back at the tempestuous band behind “Take It Easy” was an obvious early choice. “What sort of delighted us about that film was that you have this really soft sound,” Meyers told Rolling Stone in 2015, “and then you have these aggressive alpha males talking about the journey to get that soft sound.” That journey involved no shortage of physical altercations, drug busts, firings, and bruising lawsuits — and thankfully all seven past-and-present Eagles aren’t shy about re-living it on camera. It culminates with Glen Frey and Don Felder actually threatening each other during a 1980 fundraising concert for California senator Alan Cranston (“I’m going to kick your ass when we get off the stage”), and then breaking up for the next 14 years. Most sanctioned documentaries shy away from unflattering scenes like that confrontation, but the Eagles wanted a warts-and-all documentary…and that’s what exactly Ellwood gave them. It’s no wonder the Go-Go’s hired her a few years later to make their doc. —A.G.

Hip-hop’s reliance on artifice and bullshit is lifted in a profile so honest, its subject tried to prevent the film’s release. Ostensibly a movie about Lil Wayne’s rise from New Orleans teenage rapper to one of the world’s most popular MCs, The Carter shuns hagiography, showing Weezy’s hostile interviews with journalists and imbibing copious amounts of sizzurp right before the release of Tha Carter III. The rapper initially agreed to the project, but after seeing how much actual vérité the cinéma vérité-styled film had, he filed a lawsuit to prevent its distribution. A judge threw out the case, providing fans with a rare peek behind the curtain of life as a hip-hop superstar. —J.N.

Most Rolling Stones concerts over the past 40 years have taken place at arenas, stadiums and festivals — and it’s nearly impossible to make shows of that magnitude work without creating somewhat of a spectacle and playing mainly the hits. But in the fall of 2006, the Stones played a couple of gigs at New York’s 2,894-seat Beacon Theater that allowed them to create a very different kind of magic. They brought out deeper cuts like “Far Away Eyes,” “Some Girls” and “All Down The Line,” as well as inviting Jack White, Buddy Guy, and Christina Aguilera to join them for a few tunes. And lucky for us, longtime superfan Martin Scorsese was in the house, with his cameras rolling. There are many Rolling Stones concert films, but none make you feel like you’re there quite like this one. —A.G.

From psychedelic experimentalists to neo-Americana troubadours, San Francisco cult band to Rock Inc. touring entity — the free-form jam cosmonauts known as the Grateful Dead turned the Sixties notion of tuning in, turning on and dropping out into both a musical ideology and a decade-long business model. Amir Bar-Lev’s marathon-length look back (it’s nearly four hours or, to put it in Deadhead parlance, about six versions of “Dark Star”) at Jerry Garcia & Co. dives into the Dead’s history and unearths some deep cuts about their lives, their career and their demise after the frontman’s passing. It more than earns its title. —D.F.

Years before Dylan made the Newport Folk Festival famous by going electric, photographer Bert Stern traveled up to the Rhode Island city for its equally lauded jazz festival, and managed to capture a murderer’s row of musicians — Louis Armstrong, Chuck Berry, Mahalia Jackson, Thelonious Monk, Dinah Washington, Anita O’Day (whose 120mph rendition of “Tea For Two” breaks landspeed records in terms of song covers) — thrilling an outdoor audience of hipsters, hepcats, jazzbos and curious locals. Co-directed by Stern and editor Aram Avakian, Jazz on a Summer’s Day is a hell of a late ’50s time capsule. But it’s also a prototype for the modern concert film, alternating between performances, audience reactions and the ambience of the setting in an attempt to capture not just songs and sets but an entire experience. Invaluable. —D.F.

This history of Seattle grunge might be the best portrait ever of the rock and roll boom-and-bust cycle, following the rise of the city’s indigenous rock scene from hopeful nascence in the form of bands like Green River, the Melvins, Tad and Seven Year Bitch, to the Nevermind-engorged corporate/mass media feeding frenzy that came later, as well as the confused, tragic fallout. The music still sounds violently alive, and the conflicted kvetching about selling out — expressed by stars like Eddie Vedder and Soundgarden’s Kim Thayill — now has an almost prelapsarian quaintness about it (one local talks about People magazine coming to town they way one might discuss a cancer diagnosis). Few rock docs do such a good job of capturing not just the music, but the ethos behind it. —J.D.

The perfect visual embodiment of alternative rock’s “success = sucks eggs” mantra, Grant Gee’s Radiohead doc turns arena stardom into a psychological horror movie. Covering the band’s whirlwind OK Computer tour, director Grant Gee offers an impressionistic snapshot of the group (especially singer Thom Yorke) slowly losing their shit as interviews, shows, traveling and tedium wear them down. Many concert films come across as non-threatening fan items; this one is as jagged and honest about its alienation as the album that spawned it. —T.G.

This farewell to LCD Soundsystem — via capturing their final live show at Madison Square Garden in 2011 — is an excellent primer on the band’s witty, transcendent dance music. But Shut Up and Play the Hits also works as an exploration of one of pop music’s greatest challenges: knowing when it’s time to call it quits. Burly, self-deprecating singer/LCD braintrust James Murphy was always an unlikely rock star, but his thoughts on aging and fame prove that he may also be one of our sanest. —T.G.

Band records seminal album; a film captures the behind-the-scenes proceedings; everybody ends up happy. Well, two out of three ain’t bad: Wilco’s lauded Yankee Hotel Foxtrot remains the group’s bestselling album and artistic highmark, but video director Sam Jones’ movie illustrates how hard it was for Jeff Tweedy to reach the finish line. Feuding with bandmate Jay Bennett and battling label executives who didn’t like Wilco’s sonic curveball, Tweedy became an indie-rock hero, albeit one whose frequent migraines made his life hell. —T.G.

Martin Scorsese and his team spent over five years creating this look back at the life of “the Quiet Beatle” — quite a feat, considering that Harrison lived the least public life of any of the four Beatles, by a wide margin. It proved to be a monumental task that involved combing through stacks of private photos and countless hours of unseen film from his personal archives, as well as interviewing everyone from Paul McCartney and Eric Clapton to Eric Idle, Tom Petty, and even Phil Spector. That result, however, was wroth it: This two-part, 208-minute epic doesn’t just the story of the Beatles from Harrison’s vantage point — it also covers his long spiritual journey, his solo career, his home life at the British estate Friar Park, the story behind his pioneering benefit concert for Bangladesh, the evolution of Monty Python’s film career and the 1999 home invasion attack that nearly killed him. It may be too much for a casual fan, but hardcore Beatlemaniacs rightfully recognize this as the best account of Harrison’s life. —A.G.

An embarrassment of musical riches, Michel Gondry’s chronicle of Dave Chappelle’s “surprise” get-together in Brooklyn watches as the TV star uses his clout to coax acts like Dead Prez, Jill Scott, Erykah Badu and a reunited Fugees to perform. It’s also a nonchalant portrait of a gifted comedian on the cusp of reaching a career-defining crossroads (he would abandon his influential Chappelle’s Show the following year), but in terms of a hip-hop/neo-soul revue circa 2004, this documentary is damn near peerless. Six words: Kanye West and a marching band. —T.G.

The Ry Cooder-produced 1997 album “Buena Vista Social Club” was an unexpected international sensation, introducing millions of listeners to Cuban music. Two years later, German filmmaker Wim Wenders’ appropriately (and uncharacteristically) straightforward film documented Cooder’s subsequent trip to Havana to record an album by 72-year-old singer Ibrahim Ferrer, as well as several Buena Vista Social Club concerts in New York and Amsterdam. The movie is politically hands off, letting images of a decaying Havana speak for themselves, while unpretentiously capturing wonderful performances by a multi-generational group of musicians — most memorably 77 year-old pianist Ruben Gonzales, who was playing as an accompaniment to ballet classes when Cooder found him. —J.D.

If you’ve ever fast-forwarded past the familial psychodrama bits of Purple Rain to get to the performance footage, then this Prince concert film — directed by the mono-monikered man himself — is a dream come true. There are a few offstage scenes to buffer the musical numbers (a word-game contest between prostitutes and a john here, a writhing around a back alley there), but mostly, it’s simply the artist doing what he does best: ripping through numbers off the titular album that synthesize Hendrix’s guitar heroics, James Brown’s dance moves and Sly Stone’s social commentary into one white-hot funk-up. This is what a Prince show looked like in 1987, complete with lingerie-chic outfits, urban-blight set decor, cameos from Sheena Easton and a post-Revolution band that includes Sheila E. treating her drum set like it owed her money. —D.F.

Director Penelope Spheeris’ first Decline of Western Civilization captured the ragged desperation and willful poverty of L.A.’s hardcore bands in 1981, but The Metal Years showed what happens when the same types of musicians got a little money, a lot of drugs and gallons of hairspray. W.A.S.P. guitarist Chris Holmes steals the show by drunkenly floating in a swimming pool while arguing with his mom, but jaw-dropping scenes of Ozzy Osbourne cooking breakfast in a leopard-print robe and Kiss’ Paul Stanley flanked in bed with scantly clad women also help the film live up to its Decline title. —K.G.

With this portrait of the late trumpeter Lee Morgan, Swedish director Kasper Collin spliced two genres that shouldn’t make any kind of sense together — true crime and jazz documentary — and ended up with a moody, sui generis triumph. At the film’s heart is a haunting retelling of the 1972 shooting of Morgan at New York club Slugs’ Saloon by his common-law wife, Helen. Collin fleshes out that account with intimate recollections from his subject’s musical peers and a revelatory 1996 audio interview with Helen herself, crafting an impressively shaded story of how the woman who ultimately took his life had previously saved him from the throes of addiction. The film expertly captures the eerie pull that that night at Slugs’ still has for everyone in the Morgans’ orbit — and why the tragedy of the shooting runs deeper than the loss of one musical giant. —H.S.

Few bands have had such a divide between critical praise and fan adulation as Rush. Sam Dunn and Scot McFadyen’s straightforward doc chronicles the Canadian group from its beginnings as a high school band to the arena-filling prog behemoths they would become. Trent Reznor, Les Claypool, Jack Black, Kirk Hammett, Gene Simmons and Billy Corgan all appear to laud the group’s music and influence, but this one makes the list for the treasure trove of archival footage geared toward the Rush completist (including a teen Alex Lifeson fighting with his parents about not finishing school). When the film was released, the self-described “world’s most popular cult band” were still three years away from their Hall of Fame induction, but Stage functions as the cinematic accompaniment to that cherry-on-top honor. —J.N.

On December 11th, 1968, Mick Jagger — tired of conventional concert performances — assembled the Who, Eric Clapton, Jethro Tull, Mitch Mitchell, Marianne Faithfull and Yoko Ono inside an replicated big top, combining actual circus performers with one-off collaborations. Despite the historical importance — it was Brian Jones’ last public performance and the only time Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi performed with Tull — the footage was shelved for nearly 30 years, reportedly due to the Stones’ unhappiness with their own set (and by being upstaged by Pete Townshend and Co.). Gimme Shelter and Shine a Light are better documents of the band, but nothing compares to the sheer lunacy and singularity of this doc that literalized the metaphorical circus that was both the Stones in 1968 and Swinging London. —J.N.

The best doc on reggae music’s No. 1 prophet touches on nearly everything you’d want from such a thorough look back at the gone-too-soon legend. With the help of just about every then-surviving Wailer and family member, we see and hear about: Marley’s upbringing (and his white father), his early recordings and brief period in Delaware (growing tall weed!), the evolution of reggae, the acrimonious departures of Wailers co-founders Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer, the 1976 assassination attempt, and his final days as he struggled to beat melanoma. Ample footage of him on stage and in the studio — Marley fully in thrall to his music — also captures his undeniable, simmering charisma. (The many smitten women in his life also attest to how potent that was too.) —D.B.

Doc legend D.A. Pennebaker knew little about David Bowie’s music before he captured what would be his last performance as glam god Ziggy Stardust — but he certainly knew a star when he saw one. Bathed in a red spotlight, and voguing via scarlet hair, dark raccoon eyes, and an assortment of feathers, knee highs, black mesh and bangles, the Thin White Duke’s a shimmering, intergalactic Dietrich. Pennebaker sticks to the stage to present a near-complete record of the show, witnessing several mind-melting solos by sideman Mick Ronson, not to mention Bowie’s formidably bare thighs. EH

No, Sharon Stone wasn’t a teenage groupie on Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour of 1975/76. Congressman Jack Tanner — from Robert Altman’s 1988 campaign mockumentary Tanner ’88 — didn’t materialize from the fictional universe to attend a show in Niagara Falls. And Dylan wasn’t inspired to wear white makeup onstage after seeing a Kiss concert in Queens. Adding these fake elements into an otherwise straight account of the tour (which draws from a lot of previously-unseen outtakes from Renaldo and Clara) is a typically perverse Dylan move that adds an element of mischief and confusion to the project. It’s also an acknowledgment that Napoleon was right when he said that history is a “set of lies that people have agreed upon.” In this case, the lies are quite entertaining. More importantly, the concert footage captures Dylan at one of his peaks as a live performer. —A.G.