Great rock-docs need blood on the floor

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Metallica, Dorian Lynskey
Metallica filming Some Kind of Monster, which 'transcends its niche'. Photograph: Annamaria DiSanto/Radical Media

Who actually watches rock documentaries? It's a persistent question, invited yet again by three prestigious new studies of George Harrison (Martin Scorsese's Living in the Material World), U2 (Davis Guggenheim's From the Sky Down) and Pearl Jam (Cameron Crowe's Pearl Jam Twenty). While not as Pravda-like as the record company-funded featurettes you find on DVD extras or late-night TV, they are all films made by fans for fans. The latter two (Scorsese's epic is more searching) are basically benign propaganda about decent people overcoming obstacles in the name of musical excellence.

The problem lies less with individual film-makers than with the form itself. I've seen a lot of rock documentaries and would recommend maybe a dozen. In the vast majority, the stories are so well-established that all the directors can do is fill in the details. Fame and hindsight conspire to stifle drama, as oft-interviewed stars deliver narratives that have been crafted and burnished over the years. That's why the best films about major stars are made in the moment. The viewer may know what happened to Bob Dylan during the making of DA Pennebaker's Don't Look Back or the Rolling Stones during the Maysles brothers' Gimme Shelter but neither the musicians nor the film-makers did. The story had yet to make itself clear, let alone become myth.

Similarly, the scenes with real frisson in retrospective documentaries tend to come from archive footage. To watch U2 feeling their way in the studio, not knowing if 1991's Achtung Baby will be their salvation or their undoing, or Harrison snapping at Paul McCartney during one of the Beatles' terminal recording sessions, is to feel the uncertainty and vulnerability that exists in even the biggest bands.

Doubt caught on camera, rather than recollected in tranquillity, is a mesmerising thing. Hence the appeal of Some Kind of Monster (Metallica), Meeting People is Easy (Radiohead) and I Am Trying to Break Your Heart (Wilco), three worthwhile accounts of bands having a rough time of it. Whether your response is sympathy or schadenfreude, the day-to-day process is eye-opening. Once you've seen Metallica's James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich reduced to a bickering, emotionally needy married couple seeking advice from a therapist of uncertain authority and unfortunate taste in knitwear, then you can never look at them the same way again.

Some Kind of Monster transcends its niche because it ends up being about more than its ostensible subject. It's about ego, ageing and how a multimillion-dollar business rests on volatile personal chemistry. Likewise, Don't Look Back is about fame and Dig!, Ondi Timoner's gripping study of rivalrous bands the Brian Jonestown Massacre and the Dandy Warhols, is about ambition. You watch them not necessarily as fans but as regular moviegoers hungry for an unpredictable story about human behaviour under duress. What happens when friendships falter? How does it feel to get what you thought you wanted only to realise that it's not what you expected? These are meaty subjects for cinema.

But they are rare exceptions and getting rarer. It's hard to find a subject who will consent to fly-on-the-wall scrutiny in the first place and even harder to find one who won't back out when things get messy. Each great movie, full of unguarded truths, acts more as a deterrent than an encouragement. It's hard to imagine any stadium bands watching Some Kind of Monster and thinking: "Let's invite a film crew to show the world what a bunch of whiny, emotionally inept, middle-aged boys we are." Most stars have their own story to tell and they're not interested in helping outsiders to tell less flattering alternative tales.

Perhaps there's a lesson to be learned from 2008's brilliant Anvil! The Story of Anvil. Like the Brian Jonestown Massacre in Dig!, the Canadian heavy metal band get the fuzzy end of the lollipop, though theirs is a much sweeter story of endurance against the odds. In both movies, the characters feel fresh, access is plentiful and you come away knowing considerably more about the reality of a life in music. The recent spate of high-profile documentaries celebrate illustrious careers but, for the viewer, failure is almost always more interesting than success.

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