Three Recent Music Documentaries

Eight Days a Week (Ron Howard, 2016)

Amy (Asif Kapadia, 2015)

Cobain: Montage of Heck (Brett Morgen, 2015)

'Amy' and 'Montage of Heck', are brilliant-looking but joyless investigations into their subjects' lives. The first gathers together footage of Amy Winehouse taken from hand-held cameras and from peoples' smart-phones, an approach which serves to remind us of the intense, glaring spotlight of modern media where just about everyone is a potential papparazzo. The shaky close-ups create a clammy, claustrophobic atmosphere and the interviews with the various unreliable people in Winehouse's life add to the queasy effect. We get to see Amy strung out on a couch in a filthy flat, drunkenly unable to perform at a festival, looking pale and fragile in front of a hundred photographers.

Released in the same year, 'Cobain: Montage of Heck' records the songwriter's brief  and similarly troubled career using animated segments which incorporate some of the grotesque sketches from his journal. And so we see the schoolboy Kurt's attempt to have sex with a mentally disabled girl and the calamitous impact that event has on how he is viewed by his peers, and we see video footage of him and his wife as heroin-addled parents.  The narrative thrust is 'Amy was doomed from the start' and the director does his damnedest to prove this thesis.  Like 'Amy', 'Montage of Heck' doesn't shy away from the problems that both artists faced, in fact it positively revels in them.   

In both films, the music is little more than a decorative element - Winehouse's songs are played with the lyrics rolling across the screen, we hear no more than snippets of the songs that made Cobain an international star.

After all that, what a relief it is to watch The Beatles clearly having the time of their lives in 'Eight Days a Week' as they play to venues filled with screaming girls. The Fab Four smile and laugh their way through the film and the focus is very much on the music with performances of entire songs taking up most of the running time.

Is this the full story? No, of course not. These were hard-headed, ambitious people with their own neuroses and ot course a light-hearted tone would be unsuited to films covering the lives of people who committed suicide. But Kapadia and Morgen spend so much time rooting around in the dirty laundry bag that they appear to forget the joyous, life-affirming music (and yes, despite their often grim subject-matter, Nirvana's songs are liberating and bracing, at their best) that Winehouse and Cobain created.

Ron Howard rightly puts the music front and centre because it's as much as 'the real story' as The Beatles' lives off-stage and out of the studio.  It's sad to that barely ten seconds are devoted to Amy's influences - I'd rather see some footage of Sarah Vaughan and Thelonius Monk rather than the witless mumblings of Winehouse's boyfriend.

Making and performing music is wonderful, musicians generally enjoy one another's company and the creative process involves work and inspiration but 'Amy' and 'Cobain: Montage of  Heck' choose ot ignore these facts and prefer to focus on the soap opera elements of stardom.