Great Fictional Rock Movies: An Argument

Recently, I had a fun, characteristically robust email exchange with my friend Michael Azerrad, a music journalist and co-producer of A.J. Schnack’s Kurt Cobain: About a Son, about the various ways that rock musicians have been depicted on film. Why have the efforts of so many filmmakers to imagine the lives and careers of rockers, headbangers, punks, mods, queercore ranters, glam artists, and other imaginary ax men and preening lead vocalists been so uniformly lackluster? He was still waiting, he confessed, to lay eyes on the Great Fictional Rock Movie. Even so, we both acknowledged that Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap had nailed all the absurdities and clichés of the post-Beatles, stadium-rock milieu—the hilariously fraught dynamics between bandmates, bookers, hangers-on, and oily management types — with gleefully incisive brilliance. Who could top that? With Sacha Gervasi’s Anvil! The Story of Anvil finally thrashing its way into theaters today after a triumphant, yearlong festival run, it’s tempting to say that life has imitated farce. Nevertheless, you can be sure this tenderly wrought, wryly funny, bittersweet portrait of two nearly senescent Canadian rock’n’rollers on the skids after a brief period of fame in the High Metal Era (the ’80s!) will enter the annals of great rock docs about musical has-beens. But leaving aside documentaries, biopics, and films starring established bands essentially playing (or playing up) a version of their public or artistic personas (you could count everything from Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night to Wayne Coyne’s Christmas on Mars in this category), how many great rock movies can you name? That is, fables born of the imagination rather than original research, interviews, published bios, or lurid tell-alls? Not many, I’d wager.