A great music documentary is about more than seeing a band or artist you like in concert. Of course, while some of the best music docs ever made are concert films, the cinematic fusion of art, sound, and performance, at its best, manages to capture the essence and personalities of a musical act, and a moment (or movement).
Here are our picks for the best music documentaries of all time, and where to see them.
At one point in this career-spanning film documenting the still-vital career of college radio pioneers and alt rock eccentrics They Might Be Giants, writer and fan Sarah Vowell tries to explain how wit and absurdity and tragedy all meet in the band's music. Just one of an impressively diverse array of talking heads assembled to extol the singular virtues of lifelong musical partners John Linnell and John Flansburgh, Vowell unpacks a line as contradictory as "everybody dies frustrated and sad and that is beautiful" (from TMBG's impossibly catchy "Don't Let's Start"). Intermittently, comic actors and enthusiasts like Andy Richter and Michael McKean recite lyrics from "I Should Be Allowed To Think" and "The End of the Tour," their spoken-word renditions stripping bare the Johns' deceptively complex writing.
Equal parts prankish and heartfelt, both the band and the film (directed by AJ Schnack) make the case that the unassuming Flansburgh and Linnell are one of the most endlessly inventive songwriting duos alive. Like the record executive depicted as getting caught up in the irresistible, hook-filled surface of the band's heart-wrenching paean to dying love, "They'll Need a Crane," the film posits that the duo's long history of couching sly profundity in alt-rock accessibility is a masterful rock smuggling act, with the Johns themselves asserting throughout that that's just how they see the world.
Gigantic is only available on DVD.