Between streaming services churning out docs on megastars and the general post-Bohemian Rhapsody fervor for music films, it is not terribly difficult for music fans to find something to watch. Whether it’s any good is another matter entirely. This year, there were some incredible highs and divisive contenders in this arena. We saw Biggie, the Beatles, the Velvets, Tina Turner, and the summer of ’69 in a new light. There were untold stories of rap power brokers and sitcoms ribbing at the music industry, a St. Vincent movie that aims for Lynchian Spinal Tap and the Father John Misty-fication of standup comedy. In alphabetical order below, we share favorites from our staff and contributors.
Check out all of Pitchfork’s 2021 wrap-up coverage here.
(All releases featured here are independently selected by our editors. When you buy something through our retail links, however, Pitchfork may earn an affiliate commission.)
All the Streets Are Silent: The Convergence of Hip Hop and Skateboarding (1987-1997)
Hip-hop and skateboarding feel like natural extensions of each other in the 21st century, but it wasn’t always like this. Both cultures began to bloom in the 1970s and met in the middle near the 1980s, supercharging their respective influence and reach. The documentary All The Streets Are Silent, directed by independent filmmaker Jeremy Elkin, focuses on skating and hip-hop’s early development from the ’80s to the turn of the millennium, bolstered by archival footage that filmmaker Eli Gesner captured during his time documenting the scene.
A sense of wonder and fun animates the film: stories of nights spent in early scene-havens like Club Mars; footage of rappers like Jay-Z and the Beastie Boys before the world knew them; seeing everyone from OG rap journalist Fab 5 Freddy and skate legend Dave Ortiz to actress Rosario Dawson reminiscing over the birth of Supreme, skateboarding tapes, and the influence of the late Harold Hunter. With an original score composed by rap’s Golden Era mainstay Large Professor, Streets is comfort food for a generation who grew up with skating and hip-hop as outsider artforms. –Dylan Green
Rent/Buy: Amazon | Apple | Google Play
The Beatles: Get Back / McCartney 3, 2, 1
Admit it: the myth of the Beatles as the greatest band in the world was cemented by their breakup—they never had a chance to suck. How it ended has always been of some fascination, and every decade or so there is some new piece of the Beatles puzzle revealed that brings us closer to the truth. Peter Jackson’s Get Back is the largest piece since the sprawling Beatles Anthology project, both because it’s not filtered through the surviving members’ memories and because it essentially debunks a key document of the Beatles breakup lore: Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s rare, tense 1970 film on the sessions behind Let It Be, the final Beatles release, and the band’s last live performance. Across three parts totaling eight hours, the guy best known for making Lord of the Rings wades through Hogg’s original footage to show us that actually, the Beatles were still friends at the end. You see the origins of the ugly “Yoko broke up the Beatles” rumor in parts where Paul is clearly wounded by John not wanting to write together anymore, mixed with the reality that Yoko was probably just mounting a performance art project, and George was justified in quitting first. You see Paul’s taskmaster energy, Ringo’s supreme goodness, George’s unmissable style, and John’s need to goof off, but most of all you get a sense of how they really interacted with one another at the worst of times. Not for the casual fan, Get Back is as good as content dumps get.
If eight hours is just not enough, or you’d prefer a more rehearsed version of Beatles history, there’s also the six-part, three-hour McCartney 3, 2, 1 docuseries, released earlier this year on Hulu. Super-producer Rick Rubin gets McCartney talking in a way that few mortal interviewers can, largely by having isolated tracks from Beatles (and a few Wings) hits cued up on the mixing board and using them as a springboard for awe and questioning. The episodes are arranged in a loosely thematic way and shot in black and white without over-adornment, adding to the candid feeling. –Jillian Mapes
Stream The Beatles: Get Back: Disney+
Stream McCartney 3, 2, 1: Hulu
Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell
Countless films have contemplated the art and mystery behind the late Notorious B.I.G. But often, the best way to illuminate a star is to glimpse back to the era before they became a giant. Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell dropped this past March, nearly 25 years after Biggie’s death, and yet the documentary offers something new: a distinctly localized view of how a legend popped beyond his street corners and even his own imagination. A bulk of the film charts Biggie Smalls’ pre-fame trajectory, using rare archival footage and family interviews alongside maps of the rapper’s now-gentrified stomping grounds in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn to emphasize how community shapes a child’s worldview. The details are in the contours: jazz performer Donald Harrison describing how Biggie learned to rap in the style of a bebop drum solo; Big’s musician uncle Dave Wallace recalling a young Biggie’s dancehall awakening in scenes filmed in Trelawny, Jamaica; his mom, Voletta Wallace, on how Biggie’s father abandoned them. By going granular, the film draws a more humanized portrait of the boy who became a rap king. –Clover Hope
Stream: Netflix
Bo Burnham: Inside
Like it or not, in 20 years, high school history teachers are probably going to be showing their students Bo Burnham’s Netflix special Inside to illuminate the crisis of the straight white American male as he hurtled towards irrelevancy. Written and filmed entirely by the songwriter/comedian alone in a one-room guest house, it is a portrait of a man fully in crisis, unsure of whether to blow his brains out or keep telling jokes. Two things keep Burnham’s self-lacerating humor on the right side of cringe throughout the special: the production, which delivers breathtaking results using the most basic, lo-fi, DIY techniques (who knew you could get so much mileage out of props and lights seemingly purchased from Party City?), and the music. Running the gamut from Speak & Spell-era Depeche Mode to faux-Broadway to Phoebe Bridgers-approved indie folk, these songs are bleak, hilarious, and catchy as hell. Watching Inside will probably make you feel like shit, but at least you’ll be laughing and singing along. –Amy Phillips
Stream: Netflix
Girls5eva (season 1)
This musical comedy from the Tina Fey universe follows a TRL-era girl group as its middle-aged members mount a comeback after a young rapper samples their big hit. That earworm’s promise—“Gonna be famous five-ever/’Cause four-ever’s too short”—has flopped. The titular girls are caught in various ruts: Dawn (Sara Bareilles) works at her brother’s restaurant; Summer (Busy Philipps) is a ditzy Housewives wannabe; Gloria (Paula Pell) is a divorced lesbian dentist; Wickie (Renée Elise Goldsberry) is pretending to be fabulous when she is actually broke. (Their fifth member, played holographically by Ashley Park, met a tragic end in an infinity pool accident.) As they patch things up and try to recapture the zeitgeist, there are nonstop riffs on late ’90s/early ’00s pop culture, the cravenness of celebrity, and the music industry’s frequently flawed attempts at girl power. The satire comes across most sharply in the songs, penned by Girls5eva creator Meredith Scardino, executive producer Jeff Richmond, and a writers’ room. (One highlight is a delightfully specific ode to New York’s hyper-mature only children, delivered in the style of Simon & Garfunkel.) All in all, Girls5eva is as infectious as the Max Martin bangers it parodies. –Quinn Moreland
Stream: Peacock
Heartworn Highways (restoration) / Without Getting Killed or Caught
Country music history is riddled with legends, folklore, and tall tales, which is part of the appeal. As much as we listen to the songs themselves, we listen to the stories around them: it’s hard to hear Hank Williams and not think about his tragic death, or consider David Allan Coe without exploring his bizarre (and probably exaggerated) biography. Documentary filmmaking offers a unique capacity to move beyond the passed-down stories, to hear the original ones from the artists themselves. That’s what makes James Szalapski’s Heartworn Highways such an essential artifact. The film collects performances and conversations from a wide spectrum of singer-songwriters across the “outlaw” country movement, from the tender poetry of Townes Van Zandt, to the prison concert of ex-convict Coe, to raucous jam sessions featuring Guy Clark and a barely post-adolescent Steve Earle. Originally released in 1981, Heartworn Highways had become a cult object among outlaw country devotees until a restoration and Blu-Ray release this year brought it to home video for the first time (it’s also streaming on Showtime).
Meanwhile, a new film, Without Getting Killed or Caught, takes a deeper look at one of the central figures of Heartworn Highways, Guy Clark, the wordsmith behind often-covered songs like “L.A. Freeway” and “Desperados Waiting for a Train.” More than recounting Clark’s biography itself, the film uses his life to pull back another often obscured layer of country music history: the significant contributions of women. Sissy Spacek reads the words and inhabits the voice of Guy’s on-again, off-again partner Susanna, who not only did the emotional and literal labor of maintaining a household filled with unruly, constantly jamming musicians, but was an accomplished songwriter in her own right, and painted the stunning covers to country classics like Willie Nelson’s Stardust and Emmylou Harris’ Quarter Moon In A Ten Cent Town. –Nadine Smith
Stream Heartworn Highways: Showtime
Rent Without Getting Killed or Caught: official website
Hip Hop Uncovered (season 1)
Regardless of the genre’s heights in the last decade, rap and hip-hop culture will always be connected to the streets. The public hears plenty of stories about rappers making it through the trenches, but the managers and A&R reps doing the grunt work behind the scenes often go unrecognized. FX’s docuseries Hip Hop Uncovered was made to correct that mistake, focusing on five OG rap power players—California’s Eugene “Big U” Henley, New York’s Debra “Deb” and James “Bimmy” Antney, Detroit’s Christian Anthony “Trick Trick” Mathis, and the Haiti-born Jacques “Haitian Jack” Agnant—and how they turned their street hustles into permanent positions in the music industry.
Like any good docuseries, Uncovered is thorough and well-paced, featuring interviews with artists, journalists, friends, and family. There’s a sense of tension that comes from hearing Deb’s stories of fighting for space as a Black woman in the industry or Trick Trick’s recollection of the night he prevented Rick Ross from playing a show in Detroit. But what helps Uncovered soar is its commitment to documenting hip-hop from its infancy to the present—it even covers the deaths of Nipsey Hussle and Pop Smoke. Hip-Hop Uncovered is rap history, in all its grit and glamour, told by those who lived it. –Dylan Green
Stream: Hulu
Keyboard Fantasies: The Beverly Glenn-Copeland Story
One of the most heartwarming musical stories of the last decade is inarguably the career revival of Beverly Glenn-Copeland, an all-about-unknown songwriter and synthesizer pioneer who began writing music in the 1960s, came out as trans in the 2000s, and found an enthusiastic audience of younger listeners in the 2010s. Keyboard Fantasies: The Beverly Glenn-Copeland Story is an appropriately warm film, about a subject who has always strived to live outside of trend, time, or place. In Posy Dixon’s one-hour documentary, he emerges as an artist and individual open to new ideas, new experiences, and new rhythms, ever-evolving like a shifting rhythm or riffed groove. At 77, Glenn-Copeland has an incredibly joyous screen presence, with an endlessly spry energy and delightful sense of humor. As the film shows, he’s found renewed purpose playing with bandmates some 50 years his junior and offering encouragement through song and word to a new generation of experimental artists. –Nadine Smith
Rent/Buy: Amazon | Apple | Google Play
The Nowhere Inn
Here’s the pitch: St. Vincent’s Annie Clark stars in a Lynchian black comedy about the rock star persona versus the person behind it, complete with dizzying tour footage from the Masseduction era and callbacks to Mulholland Drive. Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein leads a Portlandia spin-off movie about going through your flop era and navigating parental expectations. They meet in the back of a white stretch limo winding through the desert and end up back where they started, left wondering if it was all a dream.
Co-written by the pair, The Nowhere Inn premiered at Sundance 2020 and arrived in theaters this fall with no apparent purpose besides confounding viewers. With so much going on, the rockumentary works best as a document of, and response to, the disconnect between Clark’s dorky, reserved self and the ice-queen provocateur the press perceives her to be. She makes her heel-turn about a third of the way in, and from there the visual gags—like performing “Year of the Tiger” with a fake family in the Texas sticks, making a sex tape with on-screen girlfriend Dakota Johnson—grow more intense. It’s the kind of film you probably only need to see once, but if you’re interested in rock mythology and surreal imagery, and can at least tolerate goofy humor, it’s worth the trip. –Jillian Mapes
Rent/Buy: Amazon | Apple | Google Play
The Other Two (season 2)
As siblings Brooke and Cary Dubek, Heléne Yorke and Drew Tarver are the titular Other Two, a pair of faltering mid-millennials sucked into the vortex of their youngest sibling’s sudden viral pop-stardom. ChaseDreams, a stand-in for Justin Bieber and TikTok stars alike, is the unwitting 13-year-old heartthrob in question; Cary and Brooke, both aspiring or failed entertainers, try to protect their baby brother and hang on for the ride. Dubek matriarch Pat, played by Molly Shannon, perfects the optimistic but clueless support type that can needle at already-bruised creative spirits. Rounding out the cast are platinum-tier goon Ken Marino as Chase’s manager, who makes impressive moves even as he bumbles his way around the VMAs and a Hillsong spoof, and Wanda Sykes as a record-label executive so unflappably craven, she’s undeterred by Chase’s apparent lack of talent.
More than merely lampooning the caprices of the entertainment industry, The Other Two is a surprisingly empathetic examination of the creeping reaches and warping effects of fame. In season two, Shannon hits new highs between sly showbiz jabs and blatant absurdity when Pat gets her star turn as a daytime talk-show host, while Cary and Brooke struggle to feel right about their own successes. The Other Two handles the folly of industry machinations and the ache of bitter disappointments with care and loving wit, and even secondary figures get the benefit of thoughtful character development (Lance!). The show was renewed for another round at the end of season two in September, leaving the door open to plenty more emotional misadventures for the Dubeks. –Allison Hussey
Stream: HBO Max
Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
Summer of Soul is an instant classic, among the rare concert films where the performances aren’t just blips in the story but the entire pulse of the film. Director Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson discovered a diamond when he unlocked footage of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, an event held the same summer as Woodstock and featuring a cornucopia of musical icons: Sly Stone and the Family Stone, a 19-year-old Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone in her political prime, Mahalia Jackson passing a torch to Mavis Staples. It’s a two-hour feat of endurance that’s like entering a Narnia-like world of wonder. Performances stretch to the max, as interviewees deconstruct how their artistic identities intersected with a Black American revolution—the 5th Dimension’s Marilyn McCoo reflects on criticism of the group’s crossover success, and archival footage shows concertgoers decrying the moon landing. By immersing us in the many radical textures of Black music, from gospel to pop to rock, the filmmakers pull off the painstaking task of letting history speak for itself. –Clover Hope
Stream: Hulu
Tina
Tina Turner’s legacy is incomparable, a fact made evident by HBO’s venerating documentary. With direct access to the 82-year-old singer (who appears in talking-head segments from her chateau in Switzerland), Tina flies through six decades of the superstar’s life to offer an authoritative overview of her career, from her days as a trailblazing rock’n’roll pioneer in the Ike & Tina Turner Revue throughout her twenties to freeing herself from Ike’s abusive hold and reclaiming her stardom with a whirlwind second wind in her forties. As harrowing a watch as it can be, Tina dazzles with electrifying archival footage of Turner at various stages in her life. There’s nothing like seeing her whip stadiums from the UK to Brazil into a frenzy, with the knowledge of decades of hardship and history that brought the star to that triumphant moment fresh in mind. Tina affirms that Turner has long been the most fascinating, accomplished rock star in the room. –Eric Torres
Stream: HBO Max
The Velvet Underground
How in the world did the Velvet Underground happen? While there was a certain inevitability to Beatlemania and the flowering of psych acts in perma-stoned San Francisco, it’s always been harder to conceive of the Velvets’ emergence during the same decade. In his first feature documentary, Todd Haynes transports viewers to the site of that miraculous birth—a grimy and glamorous Manhattan demimonde where the rock scene converged with avant-garde music, experimental cinema, Pop Art, queer subcultures, and the spiraling lifestyles of drug addicts. The Velvet Underground brings clarity to a concentrated moment, beginning with the main ingredients of Reed’s rock-star ambitions, John Cale’s drone influences, and the crucible of New York City.
The magic of this film is in its immediacy. Haynes, the great filmmaker behind prismatic Dylan biopic I’m Not There and baroque Bowie pastiche Velvet Goldmine, has a unique talent for translating particular times, places, and creative headspaces into cinematic environments. Constrained by the nonfiction format, he wisely limits interviews to people who experienced the band in its own time, from surviving members Cale and Moe Tucker to downtown legends like Mary Woronov and the late Jonas Mekas. Their anecdotes come paired, often in split-screen, with Warhol screen tests that function almost as visual drones meditating on each subject. Collages of performance footage, poster art, and other ephemera set to familiar and rare recordings fill the screen for long enough to lift viewers off the couch and into the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. The Velvets’ music still sounds as revolutionary as if it had been recorded yesterday. For two hours, this film mesmerizes you into believing that it was. –Judy Berman
Stream: Apple TV+
