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70 Greatest Music Documentaries of All Time

Burning guitars, big suits, meeting the Beatles — the concert films, rockumentaries and artist portraits that stand head and shoulders above the rest

Photo Illustration by @photoeditorjoe. Images used in illustration: Kevin Estrada/MediaPunch/IPx/AP Images; Parkwood Entertainment/NETFLIX; Chris Walter/WireImage; Matt Dunham/AP Images; Val Wilmer/Redferns; David Lee/HBO; Amazing Grace LLC.

The movies have always loved giving actors the chance to play rock star or impersonate an iconic musician/singer, recreating those famous “Eureka!” studio moments and greatest-hits shows for any number of music biopics. When it comes to historical musical moments, however, there’s nothing like seeing the real thing. A number of documentarians saw the advantage of capturing a number of legendary artists and bands in their heyday and/or once-in-a-lifetime performances — partially for posterity, partially for plain old reportage and partially for the second-hand high of it all. And thanks to new access to archives and updated technology, a whole generation of filmmakers have come up learning the art of docu-portraits and genre breakdowns that run the gamut from sub-subgenres to broad stem-to-stern histories of rock, jazz and country-and-western. It’s never been easier to make a music documentary these days. Not all of them, of course, are created equal.

So in honor of Peter Jackson’s Get Back — a new six-episode look back at the Beatles putting together the album Let It Be even as they were beginning to fall apart — we’ve compiled a list of the 70 greatest music documentaries of all time: the concert films, fly-on-the-wall tour chronicles, punk and hip-hop and jazz time capsules, and career assessments of everyone from Amy Winehouse to the Who that have set the standard and stood the test of time. The last time we did this was in 2014, and to say that the form has produced a number of classics since then would be an understatement. Play this list loud.

From Rolling Stone US

36

‘Rolling Thunder Revue’ (2019)

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.

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35

‘Rhyme & Reason’ (1997)

Peter Spirer’s ambitious doc stands out both for its breadth of testimonials and skill in placing hip-hop as part of a broader contextual musical continuum. Eschewing flash for substance, the film interviews more than 80 rappers — including Chuck D, Lauryn Hill, Puff Daddy and Dr. Dre — to provide the most widespread examination of the form’s culture circa 1997 as well as its history. Anyone can find archival footage of a Bronx block party in the Seventies. It takes skill, though, to tie the genre back to its jazz and gospel roots without sounding didactic. —J.N.

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34

‘Year of the Horse’ (1997)

While there’s no scarcity of films about or featuring Neil Young (he’s even directed a few, including the genuinely batshit Human Highway), none capture his collaboration with longtime backing band Crazy Horse as uncannily as Jim Jarmusch’s 1996 tour diary. The director gets roasted on the bus for attempting to discover the essence of the Horse (“It’s gonna be some cutesy stuff like you’d use in some artsy film and make everybody think he’s cool,” Frank “Poncho” Sampredro predicts), but he comes damn close to embodying it through the movie’s lo-fi look and feel, which is a mash-up of fuzzed-out analog film and video, and thunderous, amp-blasting sound. EH

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33

‘Soul Power’ (2008)

Quite possibly the greatest outtakes-fueled rockumentary ever, Soul Power chronicles “Zaire ’74,” the largely forgotten concert that coincided with Muhammad Ali and George Foreman’s championship bout (a.k.a. the Rumble in the Jungle) in Kinshasa, Zaire. The fight formed the basis for the 1996 Oscar-winning documentary When We Were Kings, and 12 years later director Jeff Levy-Hinte compiled dynamite archival sets from the likes of the Spinners and Bill Withers. Spoiler alert: James Brown closes the film — and steals the show. —T.G.

32

‘Style Wars’ (1983)

In the early Eighties, before hip hop even had much of a national profile (let alone the global dominance it would eventually attain), this PBS-produced film chronicled the emergent culture in its infancy. Style Wars focused on the battle between graffiti writers and city officials, each side fighting to see who would determine the literal look of New York at the time. The city itself appears as an almost mythically gritty character in the film; its heroes are the young black and Latino kids trying to create their own identity while giving the drab urban spaces color and life; its villain is mayor Ed Koch, glibly patting himself on the back not giving these kids the death penalty. And the music on hand gives you a taste of the art form’s early landmarks, from Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message” to the Fearless Four’s “Rockin’ It.” —J.D.

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31

‘Dig!’ (2004)

A real-life This Is Spinal Tap for the indie-rock generation, Dig! proved that, at least among musicians, douchey self-delusion knows no bounds. Captured over seven years and culled from thousands of hours of footage, Ondi Timoner’s Sundance winner tracked the diverging paths of retro-Sixties singers and frenemies Anton Newcombe of the Brian Jonestown Massacre and Courtney Taylor of the Dandy Warhols. While the pragmatic, preening Taylor finds some measure of success, the gifted but toxic Newcombe is a hot mess, battling addiction, mental illness, and everyone in his path. Following an onstage brawl, he even has a “these go to 11” moment, snarling “You fuckin’ broke my sitar, fucker,” without a trace of irony. —E.H.

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30

‘The Devil and Daniel Johnston’ (2005)

Both a celebration and a cautionary tale, Jeff Feuerzeig’s portrait of the legendary outsider artist captures the heartbreaking simplicity of his songs without downplaying his mental-health issues — or glibly equating the two. The movie doesn’t condemn fans who take Johnston’s illness as proof of his authenticity, but neither does it spare exploring just how difficult it can make his life, or how much anguish it causes his loving and supportive parents. You’ll never hear “Speeding Motorcycle” the same way again. —S.A.

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29

‘Urgh! A Music War’ (1981)

Capturing a song apiece from nearly three dozen acts, this scattershot doc’s lineup might have been chosen by throwing a handful of darts into the nearest college radio station. But if nothing holds its subjects together beyond a vague allegiance to the New Wave and the fact that they were touring in 1980, Urgh! is full of jaw-dropping performances from otherwise undocumented bands like the Au Pairs, whose “Come Again” dramatizes a man’s attempt to pleasure a female lover with uncomfortable hilarity — as well as ringers like the Police, the Go-Go’s and Devo. SA

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28

‘Message to Love: The Isle of Wight Festival’ (1997)

It’s a concise encapsulation of Age-of-Aquarius contradictions: An overhead shot of some 600,000 festivalgoers filling up the grounds of the East Afton Farm on England’s Isle of Wight — which immediately cuts to the festival’s M.C., Rikki Farr, telling the audience that they can go to hell for ruining a chance at rock & roll bliss. The community-versus-commerce argument over rock-fest admission fees runs throughout Murray Lerner’s doc on the ill-fated 1970 endeavor, in which disillusioned organizers and artists tussle with hippie entitlement (“We want the world, and we want it now!”), and both iron fences and utopian hopes come crashing down. In addition to 20/20 hindsight, however, Message also brims with amazing performance footage of the period: a blistering number from The Who; Hendrix, less than three weeks from shuffling off this mortal coil, doing “Voodoo Chile”; the Doors tearing into ‘The End”; a Bitches Brew era Miles Davis Group; and Joni Mitchell, playing (ironically) “Woodstock” and almost being attacked by a dead ringer for Charles Manson. —D.F.

27

‘No Direction Home’ (2005)

Bob Dylan’s life has been studied and analyzed more than almost any other artist of the 20th Century. But Martin Scorsese still managed to create a revelatory documentary about his early days by fusing together never-before-seen footage from the Dylan vault along with new interviews with Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg, Liam Clancy, Pete Seeger, Mavis Staples, Suze Rotolo, Dave Van Ronk, and many other key figures from his past. Dylan himself even sat for a rare on-camera interview. “I had ambitions to set out and find…like an odyssey, going home somewhere,” Dylan says near at the beginning. “I was born very far from where I’m supposed to be, and so I’m on my way home.” The centerpiece of the film is thrilling footage from the 1966 tour with the Hawks where Dylan was booed most nights for playing electric music, including the fabled moment in Birmingham, England where a furious fan calls him “Judas.” —A.G.

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26

‘Wattstax’ (1973)

In its first incarnation, Stax Records was a tribute to the creative force of racial integration, but after Martin Luther King’s murder rocked Memphis to its core, new co-owner Al Bell pushed the label to pursue African-American uplift. The culmination of his vision was a celebratory concert timed to the seventh anniversary of the Watts riots, featuring Jesse Jackson and Richard Pryor alongside Isaac Hayes and the Staples Singers. For all its inspirational moments, the show is stolen by prankster Rufus Thomas, who masters an unruly crowd with his rendition of “Do the Funky Chicken.” SA

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25

‘The Filth and the Fury’ (2000)

Two decades after director Julien Temple cut his teeth by making The Great Rock & Roll Swindle, the surrealistic and sarcastic Sex Pistols mockumentary guided by their former manager, he returned to his original subject, letting the band members tell the story of the punk revolution from their perspective. The band members are all shrouded in shadows – head agitator Johnny Rotten is just an orange paintbrush of hair rising from the dark – adding emphasis to gritty, never-before-seen Seventies-era footage of the band members and their peers. The best part was Temple had the good sense to cut the story before the band’s mid-Nineties Filthy Lucre reunion. —K.G.

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24

‘Elvis: That’s the Way It Is’ (1970)

Like his 1968 comeback special, this record of the preparations for Elvis Presley’s first tour in 13 years is a tale of two Elvises. There’s the cocky country boy, whose studio performances with his crack band tap the primal energy of his best performances; and the stage entertainer, swaddled in foot-long fringe and buttressed by a small army of backing singers. (At one point, he jokes to the Vegas crowd that he’s filming a movie called “Elvis Loses His Excess.”) The 2001 recut, just released on Blu-ray, strips away footage of fans to provide more of the King in his domain. —S.A.

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23

‘Depeche Mode 101’ (1989)

The gents from Essex may be a gloomy bunch on record, but this film about the final leg of the band’s 1988 American tour is positively buoyant. Rather than a straightforward concert film like his previous Ziggy Stardust, D.A. Pennebaker (along with partner Chris Hegedus) brings their fly-on-the-wall approach to the entire traveling circus — from nimble lighting technicians to giddy number-crunchers, and from pinball-obsessed Dave Gahan to equally charismatic fans en route to see the finale at the Rose Bowl. For once, rock & roll isn’t presented as a spectacle of Dionysian excess, but of good — if not entirely clean — fun. —E.H.

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22

‘The T.A.M.I. Show’ (1964)

Justly celebrated for its incandescent performances by James Brown and the Rolling Stones — who chose, unwisely, to play after him — The T.A.M.I. Show‘s overview of “teenage music” circa 1964 serves as a primer in the tensions that would shortly rip the culture wide open. The variety-show staging and the goofy intros by emcees Jan and Dean act as a security blanket for anxious parents, assuring them that this rock & roll madness won’t get too out of hand. But by the time Brown and the Stones have worked their will on the crowd, you can feel a riot coming on. SA

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21

‘Awesome; I Fuckin’ Shot That!’ (2006)

Sure, the Beastie Boys could have hired D.A. Pennebaker or Jonathan Demme to film their Madison Square Garden concert on October 9th, 2004 — or they could just give 50 attendees digital cameras, let them shoot the show and then see what comes back. Subtitled “an authorized bootleg,” this crowd-sourced performance movie technically lists Nathaniel Hornblower (a.k.a. the lederhosen-wearing alter ego of baritoned Beastie Adam Yauch) as the director — but it really is a fans-eye view of a great show and the ultimate testament of the trio’s belief in D.I.Y. empowerment. Plus you get to see the Beastie Boys at the Garden, cold-kickin’ it live. Rest in peace, MCA. —D.F.