Last week at the Tribeca Film Festival, music wasn’t just picking up the slack for limp scenes in need of an extra touch of drama—it was everywhere. The festival has upped its commitment to music-related documentaries and features in recent years, hosting big-name concerts that correlate to the films. This year's slate of programming was no different, particularly when it came to musicians acting, directing, and of course, scoring—rather than merely serving as subjects. Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong made his acting debut in the roman-à-clef film Geezer, as an aging punk trying to find his fire again. Kid Cudi made an unexpected appearance as a sadistic gangster in the third act of Vincent N Roxxy, livening up the otherwise dismal romance. Bat for Lashes’ Natasha Khan contributed a short about a bride harboring a dark secret to the anthology project Madly. Flying Lotus lent his cosmic jazztronica to the soundtrack for the Shia Labeouf-produced avant-garde film LoveTrue. Z-Trip was even on the scene to re-score Harold Lloyd’s timeless silent comedy Safety Last! live, revitalizing the film’s anarchic slapstick with his irreverent remixes.
But for the films that claimed music as a central subject instead of constraining it to the end credits, it was more than an industry, or even a form of entertainment. Movies about music often worship the topic as a spiritual life force that soothes and empowers all those who play or even hear it. When asked about how it feels to perform in concert, many musicians offer some variation on, “It just kinda happens.” But motion pictures, liable to occasionally romanticize the admittedly romantic process of playing and singing, depict performance as an essential component of the self, a direct path to the innermost corners of the soul. Besides, nobody would buy a ticket for a movie where the troubled musician spends a half-hour waiting for his audio engineer to calibrate midrange. They want to see him experience a moment of profundity and personal revelation at the big concert’s pivotal moment.
Even if the selections at Tribeca add a dash of Hollywood to their characterization of what music is, their notion of what it does is dead-on. The feelings that these movies—which crossed nations, genres, and the increasingly tenuous line between fiction and documentary—conjure are no less real than the rush a listener gets when witnessing an intimate acoustic set or transcendent live-wire belting. Here are the ones we most enjoyed, an eclectic array of films for the toe-tappers and slam-dancers among us.
Contemporary Color
In Contemporary Color, brothers Bill and Turner Ross’ new documentary chronicling a set of wholly unique concerts coordinated by David Byrne last year, music fosters a physical sort of unity. Ten expert teams of winter-guard performers paired off with folks from Byrne’s address book to choreograph stunning new routines to original compositions from St. Vincent, tUnE-yArDs, Dev Hynes, Zola Jesus, How to Dress Well, and more. The formally adventurous film enhances these once-in-a-lifetime performances by dumping out the whole cinematic bag of tricks, working wonders with, for instance, liberal use of multiple exposures. (The image of Annie Clark serenading the crowd layered over glittering flags twirling in perfect tandem should be rendered in stained glass and placed in a cathedral.) Here, the teams’ surgically precise, synchronized movements provide a canny symbol for musical passion as a binding agent between misfit high schoolers.
Strike A Pose
For the backup dancers on Madonna’s epochal 1990 Blonde Ambition Tour, the music of Her Madgesty was more than a big gig. For many of the dancers who did not fall victim to the twin demons of addiction and the AIDS epidemic, her songs remain important, despite any personal qualms with her. This is the chief theme of Ester Gould and Reijer Zwaan’s Strike A Pose, which revisits her harem of gay dancers (with one notable exception) to inquire about how their time on the scandal-courting tour affected them professionally and personally. The gathered dancers take an ambivalent stance on the pop provocateur herself: Madonna was their best friend in the whole wide world, until she turned her back on one dancer after he contracted HIV, at which point her wholesale appropriation of gay culture became something they could not ignore. When the dancers reconvene after all these years, their enduring commitment to Madonna’s message of individuality makes it feel like no time has passed at all.
Bad Rap
Another documentary about a fascinating, insular culture unduly ignored by the mainstream, Salima Koroma’s Bad Rapwould make for a fine double feature with Strike A Pose. Through the journeys of MCs Awkwafina, Rekstizzy, Lyricks, and Dumbfoundead, the film conducts a survey of hip-hop’s troubled history with Asian-Americans. Set aside the unsavory legacy of cheap-shot stereotype jokes dished by non-Asian rappers in and out of battles, and the film’s subjects still had to contend with an industry that had no idea what to do with them, and had no interest in figuring it out. Bad Rap considers several sociological rationales, citing narratives of emasculation attached to Asian men as well as the mistaken perception that Asian-Americans don’t live “genuine” hood lives as possible causes for the glaring absence of what they refer to as “an Asian Eminem.” But of course, the same tradition that still frustrates the film's four skilled MCs provided them with community when they were on the come-up, as they forged crucial parts of their own identities through the music.
Folk Hero & Funny Guy
Though music aligned many figures in Tribeca's documentary section with like-minded spirits, characters in the fiction films found a route to themselves through the therapeutic magic of song. The “folk hero” part of Jeff Grace’sroad-trip indie Folk Hero & Funny Guyrefers to Jason Black, a separated-at-birth Avett brother who warbles out sweetly worn tunes while barefoot. Wyatt Russell (son of Kurt, though if he nails a few more performances like this, people will forget all about that right quick) inhabits the role believably, conveying the good nature and perpetual tiredness of the typical touring musician while concealing actorly vulnerability and hurt. Most of the movie focuses on the funny guy (Girls’ Alex Karpovsky), but both men use their craft to pave a path to self-actualization, working through personal crises onstage. Most impressively, the original compositions that Jason Black performs sound and feel like actual songs, not songs written for a movie, and the difference between the two can seal or wreck a film. From the soundtrack on through to the emotional underpinnings of both characters, honesty makes their ramble along the Eastern seaboard a joy to join.
As I Open My Eyes
The festival’s finest offering as far as musically-themed films go, Leyla Bouzid’s Tunisian coming-of-age drama As I Open My Eyesframes music as a powerful platform not just for a community, not just for an individual, but for an entire nation. Teenager Farah (Baya Medhaffer, absolutely mesmerizing) wants to hang out with her friends and play in a band, but the subversive content of their politically critical songs’ lyrics makes the group targets as the nation prepares for the Jasmine Revolution of 2010 and 2011. As Farah learns about the terrible realities of the adult world, the alternately chaotic and serene Tunisian tunes embolden her and help her to metaphorically find her voice. Perhaps even more urgently, the subtext in their art enables them to reclaim some semblance of freedom in a turbulent time. Under a repressive regime, all songs are protest songs, and protest songs qualify as an act of outright rebellion. The revolution may not be televised, but it will be mixed with just the right amount of reverb.