In 2022, Charli XCX emblazoned “they don’t build statues of critics” on a custom t-shirt––a little nudge and provocation rather than a knock-down to a great tradition of writing. And they do make (rightly) fawning documentaries about them, with Matty Wishnow’s The Last Critic premiering in SXSW’s Documentary Feature Competition and examining the pioneering music writer Robert Christgau, now 83 and infamously known as the “Dean of American Rock Critics.”
With a prestigious background in the music business and Austin tech, Wishnow makes a belated pivot to a new medium and acquits himself finely, staying comfortably within rock-doc convention while offering real insight into a rich subject. To put it succinctly: The Last Critic moves critics from their Greek chorus-like roles of talking heads in artist- or genre-driven documentaries towards the unambiguous center. With a perch at the Village Voice during the height of its counter-cultural influence, Christgau commanded an unusual cult of personality and authority as he doled out alternately loving and caustic takes on newly released albums of many genres from big and small labels.
Speaking for myself: although I primarily write about international cinema, I couldn’t imagine being attracted to criticism as a vocation if not for Christgau’s towering example. And looking at the interviewees collected here––from acolytes such as the New Yorker’s Amanda Petrusich and the Bandsplain podcast’s Yasi Salek to musicians he championed like Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth and Randy Newman––I’m far from alone (though we’re a small niche). These folks pop up to offer their insightful observations, fill in the backstory, and offer touches of skepticism, yet Wishnow primarily made a hangout movie and, crucially, a portrait of a marriage. Tracking through his floor-to-ceiling hallways of CD shelves, you’d never imagine running shotgun with a cranky, octogenarian pop-music enthusiast could be so fun.
But, to quote a lighter example of the early hip-hop he loved, “it takes two to make a thing go right”: his spouse Carola Dibbell––a talented rock critic and science-fiction novelist––is where “Bob” (as he’s known, colloquially) begins and ends, and they’re partners in musical and intellectual exploration as much as romance. We even get a snapshot of their meet-cute: a friendly argument on a Manhattan street about the virtues of Godard’s Rolling Stones study One Plus One, from his Dziga Vertov period. It’s those kinds of conversations that signal the first of many to come.
Viewers familiar with the topic might be restless amidst its recounting of widely available info. It also may be too overwhelming and insular for neophytes, yet Wishnow is skilled at doling out exposition and skipping across the passage of time, so the former should happily anticipate each expected development––like an infectious pop song you want to hear again, to use a cliché he would’ve hated (he was an uncompromising editor of tyro writers, we learn). Straub-Huillet films are famed for extended scenes of subjects simply reading aloud; the likes of Rob Sheffield and Nelson George mimic that here, treating capsules on Prince’s 1980 breakthrough Dirty Mind and Ohio country-drone rockers Wussy like fragments of rare wisdom.
Christgau was a legend, but how ironic is the film’s title? He was anything but “the last critic”; anyone with a sharp-elbowed take on pop culture, plus a prominent platform, is a spiritual successor. Yet he wrote with the urgency and fear that his modest pursuit was always on borrowed time, and the followers interviewed here fret their own responsibility for criticism withering away if they couldn’t maintain his level. His review of DJ Shadow’s 1996 masterpiece of beatwork Entroducing….. is a particular favorite; it’s the one I always share to exhibit his particular talent for description and narrative flow. He’s a testament, and the film too, to how art finds its meaning when it leaves its creators’ heads and reaches its audience, whose task is to put it in their own words.
The Last Critic premiered at SXSW.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source thefilmstage.com ’
