Two documentaries released this year have turned the camera on two of popular music’s biggest names: Paul McCartney, in Morgan Neville’s Man on the Run, and Jay-Z, in the HBO series Jay-Z in 8.
Neville’s film deals with the 12 years from about 1968 to 1980, when McCartney left the Beatles behind, went solo and then formed Wings. It is built around previously unseen material of McCartney, his family and the band.
The story opens on a remote Scottish farm. McCartney is there with Linda and their young children, unsure what to do next. McCartney says in the film that it was Lennon who wanted out.
From there, the film tracks his road back to sold-out American arenas. It also covers the low points: hostile reviews of his early solo records, his decision to take his former bandmates to court, and a short spell behind bars in Japan.
Jay-Z in 8 runs to eight episodes, shot in monochrome during 2024. The rapper sits across a table from Rick Rubin, who co-founded Def Jam, in a bare room inside the Palais Brongniart, once home to the Paris stock exchange. Rubin plays tracks from Jay-Z’s three decades of releases, and each one leads the talk somewhere else: his parents, how he writes, the state of American culture.
Don’t Look Back (1967)
The last episode went out on October 9. In it, Jay-Z and Rubin discuss Family Feud, a track from the 2017 album 4:44, and the line “Al Sharpton in the mirror takin’ selfies / How is him or Pill Cosby ‘posed to help me?” Jay-Z explained that the line was aimed at the civil rights campaigner and the disgraced comedian for their constant criticism of hip-hop. He described Sharpton as an “extortionist” who travels “from place to place” with the message: “You want our support ... give us the money.” In the same episode, he named generational wealth as his answer to racism.
Both releases belong to a long tradition of films about music and the people who make it. The 25 below are listed by year of release.
Don’t Look Back (1967)
Bob Dylan’s 1965 visit to England, filmed by D.A. Pennebaker with a lightweight camera, shaped how later generations would picture the mid-1960s music scene. The opening, in which Dylan flicks through cue cards to Subterranean Homesick Blues, has since been borrowed by INXS and by the film Bob Roberts. Pennebaker records the strain of a tour, a rising star dealing with sudden fame, and reporters who seem to have little idea who they are talking to.
Woodstock (1970)
Michael Wadleigh’s account of the 1969 festival runs about three hours. A 1994 director’s cut stretched it to almost four. Split screens let the film show the stage and the crowd side by side, so sets by Jimi Hendrix, Richie Havens and the Who appear alongside gridlocked roads and toilets that could not cope. It won the Oscar for best documentary, did big business in cinemas, and brought together Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker, who would edit his films for decades.
Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii (1972)
Gimme Shelter (1970)
The Rolling Stones’ 1969 American tour ended with a free concert at Altamont, California, where 18-year-old Meredith Hunter was killed in front of the stage. Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin build the film towards that event while also showing how much power the band held over a crowd. The final shot shows Mick Jagger watching the footage back.
Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii (1972)
There is no crowd here. Pink Floyd set up in the ancient amphitheatre at Pompeii with only the camera crew watching, and play pieces such as Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun, with Echoes split across the start and finish. Stone ruins, overgrown grass, volcanic terrain and an occasional dog form the backdrop. Later additions of studio scenes from the Dark Side of the Moon sessions make the film a link between the band’s psychedelic period and their progressive-rock years.
The Song Remains the Same (1976)
Led Zeppelin’s concert film is padded out with fantasy sequences in which band members ride horses, swing swords and turn up as gangsters and hermits. Strip those away and what remains was, for a long time, the best footage of the group performing live. It is also a record of how big rock shows had become by the mid-1970s, with a drum solo partly played by hand and a guitar solo played with a violin bow.
Gimme Shelter (1970)
The Last Waltz (1978)
Martin Scorsese filmed the Band’s final concert, held in San Francisco on Thanksgiving in 1976. The group invited the musicians who had shaped them or played alongside them, including Muddy Waters, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Neil Diamond. Their sets are interspersed with conversations in which the band members recall life on tour. Laszlo Kovacs and Vilmos Zsigmond shot the film.
The Kids Are Alright (1979)
Jeff Stein compiled TV clips, festival performances, interviews and odds and ends into a history of the Who. The film moves from their early days as a mod group playing R&B through to their stadium years. Its structure is as unruly as the band. Along the way it charts how British rock changed, from blues covers to pop art, feedback, psychedelia and rock operas.
The Decline of Western Civilization (1981)
Penelope Spheeris pointed her camera at Los Angeles punk bands that were still unknown. Exene Cervenka of X frets about how fans would react to a $6 ticket price. Black Flag singer Ron Reyes gives a tour of his bedroom, a cupboard in a run-down former church that costs him $16 a month. Spheeris went on to make two sequels, one about heavy metal and one about homeless young punks in the city.
Woodstock (1970)
Stop Making Sense (1984)
Talking Heads and the director Jonathan Demme chose to leave out the usual shots of cheering fans and let staging and lighting carry the film. “We didn’t want any of the bull***t,” Chris Frantz, the band’s drummer, told Rolling Stone. “We didn’t want the clichés.” It opens with David Byrne alone on stage with a tape player, performing Psycho Killer. Over 88 minutes, the band builds up around him, playing material from Speaking in Tongues and new arrangements of earlier songs such as Once in a Lifetime.
Madonna: Truth or Dare (1991)
Shot during the Blond Ambition tour and titled In Bed with Madonna outside North America, Alek Keshishian’s film uses colour for the concerts and black and white for everything else. Warren Beatty, her partner at the time, observes that she “doesn’t want to live off-camera”. Kevin Costner receives a put-down and Antonio Banderas avoids her attention. The dancers, who quarrel and confide like a family, get as much time on screen as the star.
Buena Vista Social Club (1999)
Ry Cooder’s 1997 recordings with veteran Cuban musicians became a worldwide hit. Wim Wenders went with him when he returned to Havana to make a record with the singer Ibrahim Ferrer, then aged 72, and then filmed the ensemble on stage in Amsterdam and New York. Wenders does not comment on Cuban politics, though the city’s worn buildings are always in the background. Rubén González, the 77-year-old pianist, had been playing for ballet classes before Cooder brought him in.
Amy (2015)
Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (2004)
Bassist Jason Newsted has gone, frontman James Hetfield checks into rehab, and the remaining members of the band hire a therapist billed as a “performance enhancement coach” to help them finish an album. He soon becomes part of the writing sessions. The film is among a group of unusually exposing band documentaries made in the mid-2000s.
No Direction Home (2005)
Martin Scorsese’s portrait of Dylan’s first years as a performer was assembled from Dylan’s own archive, much of it never shown before. Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg, Pete Seeger, Liam Clancy, Suze Rotolo, Dave Van Ronk and Mavis Staples are among those interviewed, and Dylan himself speaks to camera. “I was born very far from where I’m supposed to be, and so I’m on my way home,” he says early in the film. The climax is the 1966 tour with the Hawks, when crowds jeered his electric sets, ending with a heckler in England calling him “Judas”.
The Last Waltz (1978)
The Devil and Daniel Johnston (2005)
Daniel Johnston recorded fragile, homemade songs that won him admirers in Austin in the 1980s and, later, covers by musicians including Tom Waits and Karen O. Jeff Feuerzeig’s film draws on Johnston’s own tapes and videos and on interviews with him and the people around him. It also deals with his bipolar disorder, including an episode in which he made his father crash-land a light aircraft, and the burden his illness placed on his parents.
George Harrison: Living in the Material World (2011)
George Harrison kept a lower profile than any other Beatle, which made this 208-minute, two-part film a five-year job for Martin Scorsese. His team worked through the family’s photographs and home films, and interviewed Eric Clapton, Paul McCartney, Tom Petty, Eric Idle and Phil Spector, among others. Beyond the Beatles, the film covers Harrison’s spiritual search, his solo records, his life at Friar Park, the Concert for Bangladesh, his backing for Monty Python’s films and the knife attack at his home in 1999.
Searching for Sugar Man (2012)
In the 1970s, Sixto Rodriguez’s albums went almost unnoticed in America. In South Africa, though, his songs became anthems for the anti-apartheid generation. The film, which won an Oscar, follows two South African fans trying to find out what happened to him. Its success led to a late revival of his career.
Searching for Sugar Man (2012)
20 Feet From Stardom (2013)
Morgan Neville took the best documentary Oscar for this film on the singers who stand behind the stars. Darlene Love, Lisa Fischer and Merry Clayton have between them sung with acts from the Ronettes to Sinatra and Sting, and several started out in church choirs. In the most-watched scene, Clayton listens back to her solo vocal from the Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter and talks about the night she recorded it. Bruce Springsteen describes the move from the back of the stage to the front as “the long walk”.
Finding Fela! (2014)
Alex Gibney set out to film the making of Fela!, the Broadway musical about the Nigerian Afrobeat pioneer, which became the first Broadway production to play in Africa with its original cast when it went to Lagos. The project grew into a biography of Fela Anikulapo Kuti, whose songs, including Zombie and Go Slow, ridiculed Nigeria’s military rulers and police. The film visits Kalakuta Republic, the compound Kuti declared independent and shared with his 27 wives, his children and his musicians. Soldiers raided it in 1977, leaving him badly hurt; his mother was thrown from a window and later died. The film also includes Kuti performing with Afrika ‘70 in Berlin in 1978, interviews with the musical’s director, Bill T. Jones, and material from the 1982 film Music Is the Weapon.
Amy (2015)
Asif Kapadia, the director of Senna, pieced together Amy Winehouse’s life from mobile phone clips, camcorder footage, news reports and television appearances. It follows her from an EMI publishing contract signed in her teens to Back to Black, the 2006 album that sold 12 million copies and earned five Grammys, and on to her death from alcohol poisoning in 2011, aged 27. Her father, her husband and her manager are all part of the story. So are the recording sessions behind her best-known songs. Amy won the Oscar for best documentary feature and the Grammy for best music film.
Cobain: Montage of Heck (2015)
Brett Morgen had access to Kurt Cobain’s private archive: home videos, diaries, sketches, notebooks and tapes. He mixed these with interviews and live footage to trace the Nirvana frontman’s life from his earliest attempts at art and music to his final years. The last scene is Cobain thanking the crowd at the band’s MTV Unplugged show.
Madonna: Truth or Dare (1991)
What Happened, Miss Simone? (2015)
Nina Simone trained as a classical pianist but was denied the concert career she wanted as a child because of segregation. Liz Garbus’s film, packed with live performances, follows her into the civil rights movement of the 1960s, when songs such as Mississippi Goddam took racism head-on. The cost of that stance, to her record sales and later to her personal life, is the second half of the story.
Rolling Thunder Revue (2019)
Five years before Timothée Chalamet portrayed Dylan in the 2024 biopic A Complete Unknown, Martin Scorsese returned to the singer with a film about his 1975–76 touring show. He mixes in deliberate fictions. Sharon Stone appears as a teenage fan who joined the tour, which she was not. Michael Murphy plays Jack Tanner, the congressman he created in Robert Altman’s Tanner ‘88, as if Tanner had attended a concert. Dylan offers an invented reason for his white face paint, crediting a Kiss show in Queens. The rest is real, drawn largely from unused footage shot for Dylan’s 1978 film Renaldo and Clara, with Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Sam Shepard and Allen Ginsberg among the travelling company. The live performances show Dylan at the height of his stage powers.
Summer of Soul (2021)
Across six Sundays in 1969, a park in Harlem hosted the Harlem Cultural Festival, featuring Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, BB King, Sly and the Family Stone, Gladys Knight & the Pips and the Staple Singers. It was filmed, then largely forgotten, while Woodstock, held the same summer, took the headlines. Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson of the Roots restored the footage for his directing debut, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. The film’s emotional peak is Mahalia Jackson and Mavis Staples sharing Take My Hand, Precious Lord.
The Velvet Underground (2021)
Very little film of the Velvet Underground exists, and almost none from after 1968, when they parted ways with Andy Warhol. Todd Haynes worked around that gap by surrounding the band with the art, film and music of 1960s New York that shaped them. Lou Reed is heard in archive recordings. John Cale and Maureen Tucker, the surviving members, do most of the talking, which shifts the story away from Reed’s long-dominant account.
Little Richard: I Am Everything (2023)
Born Richard Wayne Penniman in Macon, Georgia, Little Richard combined gospel, soul and rhythm & blues piano with flamboyant, queer-coded stagecraft at a time when America was still segregated. Lisa Cortes’s film charts his career through archive material and the recollections of friends and fellow musicians. It argues that he never got the credit he was owed while he was alive.