Beastie Boys Story (2020, Spike Jonze) (Patreon)

51/100

Can't imagine anyone unencumbered by a word count having much to say about this—it's no more a film than was An Inconvenient Truth, consisting entirely of Ad-Rock and Mike D standing on a stage and narrating the history of their band, accompanied by clips and photos. (Mostly the early history. Film's two hours and it takes them 90 minutes to reach Ill Communication, at which point they pretty much skip ahead to Yauch's death.) Still moderately interesting to me due to my own Beastie Boys history: I initially despised them, failing to recognize "Fight for Your Right" or any other element of their collective persona as sarcasm, and consequently didn't hear Paul's Boutique or Check Your Head until post-"Sabotage." They truly came across like moronic frat guys in their videos and interviews, so watching a middle-aged Horovitz and Diamond talk about how much that image came to embarrass them, and inspired the direction they eventually took, wasn't without interest for me, even though I already knew the basics. And it's hard not to be affected by Adam getting visibly choked up talking about Yauch, to the point where he (inaudibly, but it's pretty clear) asks Mike to cover his part of the script for a few seconds so that he can regain his composure. At the same time, that's possible because they're reading everything off of gigantic prompters at the back of the room, which speaks to how processed this experience is. I watched it mostly out of loyalty to Jonze, but the only evidence of his sensibility involves leaving in a few tech bloopers (that might well have been staged, honestly); I'd rather have seen an entire feature in the style of Story's end-credits cookie—a rapid-fire, barely coherent montage of archival nonsense that's much more in keeping with the Beastie ethos.