Published to worldwide acclaim in 2017, journalist Lizzy Gordon’s Meet Me in the Bathroom was a gossipy, juicy, forensically researched oral history of New York City’s resurgent underground rock scene at the dawn of the 21st century. Titled after a song by The Strokes, Gordon’s weighty chronicle has now been adapted into a feature-length documentary by British directing duo Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern, with the author credited as executive producer.
Full of sound and fury, this Sundance film festival world premiere is an effortlessly fun watch for even the most casual rock fan, though it inevitably lacks the scope and depth of its 600-page source material. Initially mooted as a multi-part series, Meet Me in the Bathroom has instead been condensed into a lean 105 minutes, hence its diffuse and sometimes scrappy narrative. But given the enduring fame of the main bands covered here, and nostalgic fondness for New York’s grungy musical demi-monde, this rowdy bohemian rhapsody will have no problem finding outlets and audiences.
Lovelace and Southern have previously made feature documentaries on the bands Blur and LCD Soundsystem – indeed, the latter figure prominently in Meet Me in the Bathroom alongside The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, TV On The Radio and a handful of smaller artists who coalesced around downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn at the start of this millennium. But this time the directing duo are working in a different mode, layering audio interview snippets into a dense, fast-moving collage of pre-existing visuals, scratchy home movies, found footage and media clips..
The most thrilling material here is the early footage, often shot by the bands themselves, capturing embryonic performances, wild parties, tour-bus camaraderie, innocent idealism and hungry ambition, before the inevitable fame fatigue brings friction and addiction, breakdowns and break-ups. The interviews vary wildly in insight and wit. While The Strokes generally come over as surly and monosyllabic, James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem brings welcome self-aware irony to New York’s downtown hipster codes, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs singer Karen O mounts an eloquent critique of music-scene sexism. Speaking of which, the inclusion of former indie-rock golden boy Ryan Adams, with no mention of the sexual misconduct allegations that later imploded his career, feels slightly jarring in the current climate.
Goodman’s panoramic oral history found room for a wider cast list of bands including Vampire Weekend. The National and Dirty Projectors, and even for non-NYC artists such as The White Stripes and Franz Ferdinand. All are absent from the story here. In addition, the book highlighted how many of the scene’s prime movers had the invisible privilege of rich families or inherited wealth behind them, notably the Strokes, whose met at various elite private schools. Goodman also explored the post-millennial exodus of musicians from overpriced Manhattan to low-rent Brooklyn, fuelling the hipster-led gentrification of run-down neighbourhoods like Williamsburg. Lovelace and Southern touch briefly on these broader socio-political themes, especially in a brief but sombre section covering the 9/11 attacks, but they mostly keep the tone breezy and personal.
Bookended by a recording of Walt Whitman’s poem Give Me The Splendid SIlent Sun, a rapturous paean to the seductive beauty of Manhattan, Meet Me in the Bathroom is a heavily romanticised love letter to New York City’s reputation as grimy boho paradise. Even if that semi-mythical city ever truly existed, it had almost vanished completely by the time most of these bands strummed their first guitar chord.
As the film-makers imply with archive clips of Blondie, Lou Reed, Andy Warhol and others, these millennial artists were mostly channeling older models of New York cool, which may help explain why so many of them opted for a pretty conservative brand of ragged, punky garage rock. In truth, this musical explosion was more the end of an era that the start of a new chapter. Even so, most of the performances captured here are explosively exciting, and being inside that scene was clearly great fun, at least for a few short years. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.
Directors: Dylan Southern, Will Lovelace
Producers: Vivienne Perry, Sam Bridger, Marisa Clifford, Thomas Benski, Danny Gabai, Suroosh Alvi, Dylan Southern, Will Lovelace
Executive Producers: Brian Levy, Tim O’Shea, Isabel Davis, Lizzy Goodman, Jaime Neely
Editing: Sam Rice-Edwards, Andrew Cross
Music: Zebedee C. Budworth
Production companies: Pulse Films (UK), Vice Studios (UK), XTR (US)
World sales: Pulse Films
In English
105 min
