Review: Fred Goodman’s Rock on Film: The Movies That Rocked the Big Screen

Fred Goodman’s Rock on Film has its selling points, but breadth and depth aren’t among them.

Rock on Film: The Movies That Rocked the Big ScreenIf you publish a handsome but fitfully compelling and relatively expensive hardcover that, per its dust jacket, aims to be “the ultimate guide” to a subject lots of people have strong opinions about, you’re going to annoy at least a few of them. Fred Goodman’s Rock on Film: The Movies That Rocked the Big Screen is such a book, and though it has its selling points, breadth and depth aren’t among them.

The former Rolling Stone staffer’s collection of short essays and glorified blurbs on 50 biopics, documentaries, and other music-themed movies is breezy and alert to the charms of intellectual trivia. If it pleases you to know that documentarian and direct-cinema pioneer D.A. Pennebaker and prolix postmodern novelist William Gaddis were once roommates, then Rock on Film merits at least a skim. Open to a random page and read Goodman’s brief exegesis of, say, Gimme Shelter—the iconic 1970 Stones-at-Altamont documentary directed by Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin—then figure out where it’s streaming. Not a terrible night.

But to spend more than a couple minutes with Rock on Film is to realize that despite its packaging and pedigree—filled with appealing photos printed on high-quality paper, it bears the imprimatur of the duly esteemed Turner Classic Movies—it’s uneven and occasionally bewildering, a good-looking mediocrity meant to occupy a coffee table in a chic hotel lobby.

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Goodman’s selections include Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back, Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock, Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense, Albert Magnoli’s Purple Rain, and Franc Roddam’s Quadrophenia. All of these are unassailable choices, and some of his essays give the reader a renewed appreciation for canonical rock films. For one, Goodman notes that the “handheld cameras (and) quick cuts” that lend “immediacy” to A Hard Day’s Night are evidence of director Richard Lester’s “appreciation for how François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and the rest of the French New Wave were changing what a film could look like.”

Goodman also makes an interesting point about The Decline of Western Civilization: Part I, noting that director Penelope Spheeris’s decision to hire Steve Conant as her cinematographer—he had experience as a basketball cameraman—helped capture the sweaty physicality of its concert scenes. Blame the book’s dearth of films directed by women—you can count them on two hands—on longstanding sexism in the filmmaking and music industries.

But some of Goodman’s decisions are baffling. What are we to make of a book that devotes six pages to Lady Gaga’s film career and three-plus pages to Frank, Lenny Abrahamson’s perfectly competent but musically forgettable movie about an obscure band, but has no interest in The Song Remains the Same, the daffy, part-fictional Led Zeppelin film that so effectively captures the macho bombast of 1970s arena rock; Neil Young’s Greendale, an intelligent concept album that doubles as a satisfying narrative movie; or Lovers Rock, the Steve McQueen-directed reggae house party movie that might be the best music film of the last decade?

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Goodman explains his criteria in an introductory essay that charts the seven-decade history of rock ‘n’ roll films. Tamping down expectations raised by the dust-jacket copy, he describes the chosen movies as a subjective list of “crowd-pleasers and buried treasure,” a roster “intended to be illuminating rather than definitive.” He includes films constructed to highlight R&B, hip-hop, grunge, punk, reggae, and the novelty dreck heard in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

But aside from Bradley Cooper’s A Star is Born remake, Goodman has no time for movies about country music. Why? Because country spent the ’70s actively separating “itself musically and socially from what was happening in rock,” a propensity that he concedes “is now gone.” This is a blinkered approach that capriciously sidelines an entire genre of music that has had a formative influence on—and enduring symbiotic relationship with—rock. And so it is that Robert Altman’s Nashville and James Mangold’s Walk the Line get a sentence apiece.

Goodman’s text is augmented by interviews with Spheeris, Cameron Crowe, Taylor Hackford, Jim Jarmusch, and John Waters, each of whom is predictably thoughtful on the subject. Jarmusch, for example, explains why we hear Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s “I Put a Spell on You” in the opening act of Stranger Than Paradise, which concerns a young Hungarian woman (played by Eszter Balint) paying a visit to her cousin in Brooklyn. The song moves at the pace of a waltz, he says, and “it was the sound of that waltz tempo, that Old World thing, mixed with American R&B, the sound of the New World—that was a real guide for me into the story.”

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But do more than browse these interviews and you might find yourself rereading some of the same quotes in Goodman’s essays. Two of Crowe’s Q&A anecdotes, about his affection for a Seattle radio station and the propitious timing of Singles, appear a second time in Goodman’s brief chapter devoted to the director’s 1992 film. In a short book like this—less than 300 pages—it’s hard to understand why this kind of recycling is necessary. This isn’t the only instance of distracting repetitiveness. In an essay about Nicolas Roeg’s Performance, he writes, one character “stumbles into a druggy garden of earthly delights.” On the very next page, in an unrelated essay about Laurel Canyon, he describes how a character in the Lisa Cholodenko-directed lands in “a hitherto unknown garden of earthly delights.”

Goodman deserves credit for occasionally straying from the predictable path. He includes a short entry on Sound of Metal, but he undermines his appreciation for Darius Marder’s movie by calling it “a powerful film about the myriad ways of experiencing life.” This is frustratingly unspecific—and right at home in this book. Though Rock on Film doesn’t make a persuasive case for its own existence, it’ll look great on an end table in a nicely staged Airbnb rental, alongside other attractive, underwhelming books that will never be read in their entirety.

Fred Goodman’s Rock on Film: The Movies That Rocked the Big Screen is available on July 26 from Running Press Adult.

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Kevin Canfield

Kevin Canfield’s work has appeared in the New York Times, Cineaste, Film Comment, and other publications. He lives in New York City.

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