Let’s meet in the bathroom review

Part concert film, part documentary, 2012 Shut up and play the hits by directors Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern was a brilliant distillation of the obsessive genius and obsessive fascination of indie-electro rock’s LCD Soundsystem gods. Made on the eve of his “last” Madison Square Garden concerts, it turned out to be wholly premature, deftly drilling into the psychology of what excited singer James Murphy and what prompted him to create hypnotically danceable and unusually emotional art . -popular.

Murphy is listed as one of six artists to appear on meet me in the bathroom, which seeks to broaden the scope of that previous film and explore the whole New York indie scene that exploded in the late 90s and early 2000s. It is undoubtedly an exciting insight into music history, especially for millennials of a certain age, for whom this music was incredibly formative in their flabby early teen years, but the expanded focus makes this film a little more well rounded and a little less reflective. compared to the previous article by Lovelace and Southern.

As the biggest band of this era, the Strokes naturally get top billing and longest playing time. They are the quintessential rock stars: handsome, hairy, party animals. Watching this, you remember why Julian Casablancas was briefly hailed as the idealized and idolized leader, the rich kid who overcame his natural shyness to hold a sweaty crowd in the palm of his hand and sing dirty, bare garage. Rock anthem like they don’t care. But in this stuffy narrative, his story actually seems less interesting, and much of his narrative follows a rather clichéd musical biographical trajectory: naïve young musicians find success; a fall fueled by alcohol and drugs soon follows.

The other groups here are more intriguing. If the Strokes are the young revelers, the Moody Peaches are the flamboyant art school dropouts; Interpol are the sad and intense emos; TV On The Radio is dumb nerds; Murphy’s LCD sound system bridges the gap between indie and dance. It’s the Yeah Yeah Yeahs who provide perhaps the most compelling ride, Karen O as a mixed-race outsider who finds her tribe in the post-punk party scene as she grapples with the sexism and racism still ingrained in rock.

The film, based on Lizzy Goodman’s non-fiction oral history book of the same name, struggles to contain all those gigantic personalities and complicated web of relationships within the runtime, with scrutiny that isn’t always high enough above the surface. It spans years and events, a montage of 9/11, and its impact is never too profound, sometimes leaving the depth and insight of the original text to be desired.

meet me in the bathroom it’s best in the unspoken moments, where it conjures an electric sense of New York’s fertile valley of indie music. It leaves us on a melancholy note, with the re-zoning of the Williamsburg neighborhood, for many years the epicenter of key concerts and collaborations, divided by promoters and the ultra-rich, leaving the scene largely dissipated. Whit Stillman’s poem frames the film, giving it a quintessential New York romance: “Give me mates and lovers by the thousand…Give me those shows!” Give me the streets of Manhattan!