The opening sequence of the new film Miss Sharon Jones! flirts dangerously with cliché. A narrator guides viewers through a montage of stills, performance clips, and Sharon Jones 101 talking points: Though she was blessed with the voice and stage presence of a “female James Brown,” industry gatekeepers insisted the Dap-Kings singer was “too fat, too black, too short, and too old” to be a frontwoman. So she worked as a corrections officer and didn’t release her first album until she was 40.
Basically it could be the introduction to “Behind the Music: Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings,” a triumphant rise foreshadowing the inevitable precipitous fall. But Academy Award-winning filmmaker Barbara Kopple swerves quickly away from this style. Scenes grow longer and looser as the film progresses. This is no cautionary tale about the price of excess; it’s an intimate record of the indefatigable singer’s ongoing battle with cancer. In moving from cliché to naturalistic storytelling, Kopple underlines how dramatically Jones’ life diverges from the stories we’re used to hearing about musicians.
Miss Sharon Jones! relies, in part, on our familiarity and frustration with rock-doc boilerplate. Though its subject is one of music’s greatest ’60s revivalists, the assumption of an audience inundated with these stories makes the film remarkably contemporary. Some combination of Michael Moore’s political blockbusters, a long-tail video rental market driven by Netflix, and the increasing affordability of digital video equipment spawned an early-aughts documentary renaissance that shows no sign of ceasing, but the current decade has brought particular visibility to nonfiction films about music. Despite the Academy’s traditional preference for political entries with built-in gravity, music docs have won three out of the past four Best Documentary Feature Oscars.
Taken together, these winners—Amy, 20 Feet From Stardom, and Searching for Sugar Man—and Miss Sharon Jones! are evidence of how much the genre has changed since its first heyday in the ’60s and ’70s. Early classics like Woodstock, the Maysles’ harrowing Altamont testament Gimme Shelter, and Martin Scorsese’s fond farewell to the Band, The Last Waltz, preserved a generation’s defining events for posterity. Others took advantage of seemingly unlimited access to big personalities. D.A. Pennebaker spent enough time with a young Dylan to capture, in Dont Look Back, an artistic persona comprised of equal parts brilliance and arrogance.
Half a century later, the rise of “access journalism” means that truly revealing profiles of celebrities are as rare on film as they are in print. The music publicity machine has become too sophisticated to let filmmakers see A-list stars at their worst, preferring to let the stars themselves direct sanitized “movies” of their own lives on Snapchat and Instagram. Unflattering portraits like Robert Frank’s legally suppressed 1972 Rolling Stones doc Cocksucker Blues and Cracked Actor, the BBC’s plunge into David Bowie’s plastic soul-era cocaine hell, would simply never get made today. Meanwhile, the concert industry has ossified to the extent that mega-festivals and other branded-as-special live shows can feel interchangeable. Who (besides LCD Soundsystem fans) would wait a year to see some artist’s beautifully edited reflection on these performances when you can stream most of them online as they’re happening?
But the best rock docs of recent years aren’t just reacting to generational shifts in the music industry. Like Miss Sharon Jones!, they’re also subverting the heaps of clichés that have begun to weigh down the genre. Whether they’re profiles like Dont Look Back or concert films like The Last Waltz, so many documentaries have painted their guitar-wielding protagonists as Dionysian romantic heroes or sui generis geniuses. Films that contemplate outsize pop-star personae are still getting made, of course. But now, like Katy Perry: Part of Me and Justin Bieber’s two movies, they usually come straight out of their subjects’ propaganda factories. As fun as these glossy spectacles can be, they don’t offer much in the way of nuance.
When it premiered in 1997, VH1’s “Behind the Music”manufactured a whole new set of conventions that updated rock-star mythology for a generation more likely to know Betty Ford as a rehab center than a First Lady. By the end of a 39-episode first season that profiled such drug-ravaged legends as Fleetwood Mac, Ozzy Osbourne, and the late Keith Moon, “Behind the Music” had developed a stock storyline. Somber narrator Jim Forbes shaped each episode into a morality play about talent and temptation. If it wasn’t drugs that ruined an artist in their prime, it would be sex (Jerry Lee Lewis), fame (Selena), a freak accident (Lynyrd Skynyrd), or just thirst and stupidity (Milli Vanilli). A biography like Sharon Jones’—four decades of obscurity, followed by small-scale success, pancreatic cancer and a first Grammy nomination at age 58—doesn’t exactly fit that mold.
The film that set a new standard for music documentaries arrived a few years later, in 1999. Wim Wenders’ Oscar-nominated Buena Vista Social Club barely seems like it shares a genre with the preachy VH1 series, but it also differs markedly from the myth-making films of Pennebaker and Scorsese. On paper, it tells the story behind the Ry Cooder-catalyzed, platinum-selling album of the same name, and follows Buena Vista Social Club’s subsequent journey to perform in New York. But most of its 105 minutes are devoted to free-form interviews with the Cuban music luminaries who made up the ad-hoc ensemble, often paired with stunning Steadicam shots that glide past Havana’s peeling pastel facades and frozen-in-time ’60s cars.
Beyond documenting a recording session and a tour, Wenders crafted a travelogue, a statement about our divided world, and an audiovisual portrait of some breathtakingly talented musicians that were virtually unknown outside of Cuba before the album’s release. Instead of moving in close enough to bask in the glow of stardom, Buena Vista Social Club zooms out to capture everything that surrounds and has shaped its subjects. The film thrives on context of all kinds: economic, political, geographical, and of course, biographical.
In the 21st century, place has become an essential element of music documentaries. Perhaps in an earlier era, artists like Jarvis Cocker or Q-Tip would have been depicted as though they were born the singular figures they eventually became. But Florian Habicht’s Pulp: A Film About Life, Death, and Supermarkets (2014) connects Cocker and his bandmates’ seamy sensuality to daily life in their industrial home of Sheffield. In his superlative Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest (2011), Michael Rapaport creates the impression that Q-Tip and Phife Dawg’s youth in St. Albans, Queens made their musical careers almost inevitable. Rapaport conducts many of his interviews outdoors, walking the MCs around their old neighborhood as they recount schoolyard DJ parties and point at murals of local jazz greats like Lena Horne. The shots of pristine Norwegian fjords and forests scattered throughout Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell’s black-metal doc Until the Light Takes Us (2008) don’t just offset the film’s gore—they also help contextualize its subjects’ disconcerting brand of Nordic nationalism.
Documentarians are posing even more explicit challenges to the lone genius myth in films that illuminate the inner workings of the industry itself. There’s been a recent trend of celebrating beloved studios, from Muscle Shoals to Sound City. Morgan Neville’s 2013 Oscar winner 20 Feet From Stardom puts faces to the powerful voices of legendary backup singers like Merry Clayton, whose performance on “Gimme Shelter” still shines brighter than Mick Jagger’s. Five years earlier, Denny Tedesco honored his late father Tommy by enumerating, in The Wrecking Crew, just how many bands could thank him and his session-musician colleagues for ghost-recording their most famous albums. Tedesco’s is a somewhat less elegant film than 20 Feet, but its revelations about the deceptively collaborative star-making system of early rock ‘n’ roll complicate the entire history of the genre.
Other recent filmmakers cast a light on influential musicians most viewers haven’t even heard on someone else’s album. A Band Called Death and Anvil! The Story of Anvil both stimulated new interest in their long-forgotten subjects. A year before Neville’s moment in the spotlight with 20 Feet, Malik Bendjelloul won an Academy Award with Searching for Sugar Man, which investigates failed Detroit singer-songwriter Sixto Rodriguez’s unlikely fame in South Africa, where his anthems helped fuel the anti-apartheid movement and fans spent decades believing he’d died in an elaborate onstage suicide. Rodriguez’s stoicism is more remarkable than his music, and the otherwise captivating film overplays its hand by insisting on his brilliance. But Sugar Man proved persuasive enough to make him a star in the US anyway; he did the rounds on late-night shows and is still touring.
There’s still a place for real documentaries about mainstream icons, too, though it helps if they’re already dead. In what feels like a purposeful break with the “Behind the Music”formula, films like Amy and Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck (both released in 2015) push past platitudes about artists’ self-medication or suicide, less interested in moralizing than in capturing who their subjects really were. So many movies, fiction and nonfiction, have been made about Cobain. But Brett Morgen’s Montage of Heck digs deep into his journal entries and home movies, treating his personality—not his death—as its mystery. In Amy, Asif Kapadia doesn’t shy away from Amy Winehouse’s substance abuse or notoriously troubled relationship with Blake Fielder-Civil, but he also lets her speak for herself in videos and interview clips that reveal an exacting intelligence obscured by tabloid hysteria.
The most essential of these films is What Happened, Miss Simone? (2015), Liz Garbus’ delicate inquiry into Nina Simone’s life, told largely through conversations with her family and friends. Her daughter Lisa Simone Kelly is generous, considering how much pain her mother put her through, and her ambivalence sets the tone for the entire movie. Not everyone agrees on “what happened” to Simone over the years, as she slipped from stardom to poverty. Garbus’ decision to avoid narration in favor of a chorus of conflicting voices—a common stylistic choice that also feels like a reaction to “Behind the Music”—honors that uncertainty. Simone’s late-in-life bipolar diagnosis isn’t treated as an explanation so much as yet another wrinkle in the messy story of a boundary-breaking musician, civil rights hero, abused wife, and abusive mother.
It makes sense that we’re hearing more about mental and physical illness as directors move beyond hagiographic or didactic portraits of famous musicians, to follow the longer arcs of lives that stretch past age 27 and contain more conflict than the relationship between a man, his guitar, and a crowd of screaming fans. There’s nothing more human than Kathleen Hanna’s struggle with Lyme disease, which Sini Anderson documented to wrenching effect in 2013’s The Punk Singer, or the diabetes that hijacks the narrative of Beats, Rhymes & Life and claimed Phife Dawg’s life earlier this year.
There is no moral to these stories—they’re the same random tragedies that touch all of us. Barbara Kopple shows us a Sharon Jones who’s just as heroic for staying positive through chemo as for captivating a live audience with every syllable of “Stranger to My Happiness.” Witnessing her tenacity in the face of cancer only deepens our appreciation for her art. After decades of musical myth-making on the big and small screens, nothing seems more radical than trading a few tired rock ‘n’ roll fantasies for so many different rock ‘n’ roll realities.