The best music documentaries (and where to watch them)

Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense is a hugely influential concert film for a hugely influential band. Following American art rock group Talking Heads over four shows in December 1983, the artistry on display transcends mere rock and roll and strays into the territory of modern dance, performance art, and even theatre. It helps that the tunes are absolutely banging – Psycho Killer, Burning Down the House, Once in a Lifetime, Girlfriend is Better – and delivered in impeccable fashion by an expanded roster of crack musicians. Stunning.

The daddy of all rock docs. Woodstock covers the legendary festival that took place across three days in August 1969, and which came to form a focal point for the decade’s counterculture movement. The music is extraordinary enough by itself, with the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Crosby, Stills & Nash, The Who, Jefferson Airplane and Janis Joplin all making appearances. But it’s the film’s innovative editing style that, added to a leisurely three-hour runtime, manages to capture the ‘heightened’ spirit of the time.

Searching for Sugar Man is the fascinating tale of Sixto Rodriguez, an American folk rock musician who barely had any sort of a career on home turf in the ’60s. For some reason, however, Rodriguez attracted a huge following in South Africa, where he accrued an almost mythical status during the internationally isolated Apartheid regime years. This charming film documents the efforts of two Cape Town residents to track down the elusive artist in the late ’90s. Even the fact that Rodriguez had enjoyed a fruitful parallel career in Australia can’t take the shine off this one.

The Last Waltz is a landmark piece of music documentary filmmaking for several reasons. First there’s the subject matter, which tracks the farewell performance of North American mega-group The Band in 1976. Then there’s the stellar cast of support acts who turn out to say (or rather sing) goodbye. It’s a real who’s who of mid-’70s rock, including Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, and Joni Mitchell to name but a few. Finally, there’s the fact it was directed by a young Martin Scorsese slap band in the middle of his early golden run.

The world isn’t short of Bob Dylan documentaries, or indeed music documentaries that feature the singer songwriter in some capacity. No Direction Home, however, is about as close to definitive as it’s ever likely to get, thanks in no small part to the cooperation and contribution of the great man himself. Director Martin Scorsese zooms in on the artist’s rise-to-fame years, filling the film’s leisurely three-and-a-half-hour run time with rare archival footage and fresh interview material from Dylan and those closest to him.

Asif Kapadia’s tragic film won the best documentary Oscar back in 2016 for its moving portrait of the late British soul artist Amy Winehouse. In particular, it unflinchingly covers the artist’s issues with substance abuse, which ultimately led to her death in 2011 at the age of just 27. Featuring extensive footage of the singer from as far back as her pre-fame early teens, and drawing upon more than 100 interviews with friends and family, it’s a remarkably detailed look at the life of one of the most distinctive and yet widely imitated voices of the 21st century.

The Velvet Underground influenced a huge swathe of subsequent rock music with their primal sound, arty sensibility, and seedy lyrics, yet had precious little mainstream success or even exposure to show for it. Acclaimed director Todd Haynes smartly approaches this fascinatingly enigmatic band by painting a picture of the wider New York art scene they emerged from in the early 1960s. He does so by forming a continuous rolling collage of precious archival footage and interviews with surviving band members, an approach that proves to be both hugely evocative and deeply appropriate.

This fascinating portrait traces the life of Daniel Johnston, a cult American alternative singer who had to contend with severe mental health issues from the outset of his career in the ’80s. Johnston spent considerable time in psychiatric institutions, and was ultimately diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but his profile experienced an unlikely boost in the early ’90s after Kurt Cobain championed his music. Jeff Feuerzeig handles his subject with commendable sensitivity and huge affection, leaving viewers in no doubt as to the man’s troubled brilliance.

For decades, the final word on The Beatles’ troubled final album, Let It Be, was supplied by the ill-spirited documentary that carried the same name. In 2021, director Peter Jackson provided a stunningly comprehensive rebuttal of sorts. The Beatles: Get Back is an epic three-part 468-minute expansion and re-edit of the original Let It Be footage, remastered in such a fashion that it could have been shot Yesterday. It showcases a band that, if not quite at the peak of its powers, was still capable of contentedly making world-changing music together – with the odd tiff.

To anyone not versed in late ’90s/early ’00s US indie rock, the focus of Dig! might seem a little parochial and the stakes relatively low. But the tale of two (at best) middleweights of the scene, The Dandy Warhols and The Brian Jonestown Massacre, and their differing paths through the music industry is as fascinating an insight into such things as you’ll find. Also riveting is the rapidly decaying relationship between the two respective frontmen, Courtney Taylor-Taylor and Anton Newcombe, which is captured with startling fly-on-the-wall frankness through years worth of handheld footage.

More than a mere documentary on a seminal band, Montage of Heck serves as a deep dive into the troubled but brilliant mind of frontman and creative fulcrum Kurt Cobain. Featuring snippets taken from the artist’s journals, notebooks, artwork, home videos, and personal audio tapes, you’ll come away from this documentary feeling like you know its subject on an intimate level. Stir in some archival interviews covering the band as its popularity went stratospheric, and you have as comprehensive a look at one of rock’s great figures as you’re ever likely to get.

As the first film ever to be officially authorised by David Bowie’s estate, Moonage Daydream already has a major point of difference over all those that haven’t. Brett Morgen’s 2022 doc makes the most of its unique access to the legend’s personal archive, mixing together unreleased footage, interviews, concert performances, and more to paint a suitably unconventional portrait of a complicated and unabashedly fickle performer. The end result is a trippy montage that touches upon Bowie’s varied artistic interests, not to mention his many on-stage personalities.

Unfussily directed by Liz Garbus, What Happened, Miss Simone? follows the life of the legendary soul singer Nina Simone, calling upon previously unreleased archival footage and interviews with the artist’s friends and family. Simone’s story is about much more than just her phenomenal music and inimitable voice. Classically trained in piano from an early age, but prevented from playing due to the racial discrimination of the time, Simon’s experience and eventual triumph led her to taking an increasingly radical stance on civil rights issues.

Metallica: Some Kind of Monster proves the old cliche that being in a band is like being in a marriage. This fly-on-the wall documentary shows us an immensely successful heavy metal group essentially entering into couples therapy off the back of a collective mid-life crisis. Some of the breakthroughs made by this ultra-serious rock group would verge on the parodic, were they not delivered in such a heartfelt way. Occasionally resembling some kind of early ’00s Spinal Tap reboot, Some Kind of Monster is some kind of brilliant.

It’s perhaps a bit of an insult to suggest Buena Vista Social Club put Cuban music on the map – it had been doing perfectly fine within its geographically isolated niche before the project came to fruition. But the 1997 release of the Buena Vista Social Club album, followed by this 1999 Wim Wenders documentary, certainly amplified its reach to a global audience. The film follows American musician Ry Cooder as he assembles a group of highly acclaimed Cuban musicians to record an album and play a few international shows. It’s a great story, and the music remains transcendent.

Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s acclaimed documentary covers the criminally overlooked 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, pulling together and restoring performance footage from such soul music luminaries as Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Mahalia Jackson, Gladys Knight & the Pips, and Sly and the Family Stone. The event took place on the same weekend as Woodstock, and on this evidence should arguably have gone down in history as the more significant musical happening of the two. That it didn’t is telling in itself, and speaks to the film’s subtitle: “…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised”.

Most of the documentaries on this list concern the cream of the music industry, but Anvil! The Story of Anvil is notable for giving some love to the also-rans. Canadian heavy metal stalwarts Anvil aren’t exactly beating down the door of the rock and roll hall of fame, but that’s kind of the point of this affectionate doc made by “England’s number-one Anvil fan”. It portrays a band playing on for little more than the love of music, which involves holding down day jobs, struggling with the logistics of a European tour, and playing to empty rooms.

It’s easy to forget just how huge Depeche Mode were in their mid-to-late 80s heyday, but this documentary (with accompanying live album) leaves you in no doubt. Director D. A. Pennebaker’s key twist, and what makes his documentary stand out from others of the time, was his choice to focus on the fan perspective. In between performances taken from the English synth pop band’s triumphant 1988 Music for the Masses Tour, he tracks a group of young DM fans as they travel across America to see their idols.

Whether you’re a fan of Oasis’s music or not, this documentary will help you to understand the intoxicating rush of their mid-’90s ascent. Far from being a warts-and-all account of this famously fractious band – it doesn’t tackle their moribund later years or even their bitter breakup – it is instead a potent snapshot of a specific time and place. The film’s privileged access (Noel Gallagher is an executive producer) to backstage footage from the road offers a showcase for the band’s particular brand of humour and chaotic energy.

It might not seem sufficiently long ago to warrant the documentary treatment, but Meet Me in the Bathroom is a valuable insight into the fertile ’00s New York indie scene. Indeed, its freshness is part of the appeal, with plenty of coherent testimony from those who were there – including members of The Strokes, LCD Soundsystem, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. The film also offers a fascinating glimpse at a city recently traumatised by 9/11, with its frazzled artists necessarily forced away from Manhattan and into Brooklyn. Cue hipsters and much gentrification.