Billy Joel Documentary Shows Right Music Films Can Win New Fans

Music films don’t get much respect — most of the older ones are basically brand extensions, and many of the new ones are extended ads. These days, most biopics and “rockumentaries” are made at least partly to introduce older artists to a new generation and boost their stream counts in the process. Considering these constraints, as well as those imposed by songwriters and artists in exchange for the use of their work, it’s amazing that the best music films — think D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 Bob Dylan documentary, Don’t Look Back, and Martin Scorsese’s 1978 swan song for The Band, The Last Waltz, as well as the best concert films — are as good as they are. 

We now live in a golden age of music documentaries — as well as a glut. It’s never been more practical to make a cool documentary like What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears? But we may also have reached Peak Documentary. Not every artist has a great story, and not every filmmaker can tell that story well. This became obvious to me when I watched HBO’s new two-part Billy Joel: And So It Goes, as well as the newish Becoming Led Zeppelin and Pavements, which are streaming on Netflix and MUBI, respectively. 

Personally, I really love Pavement, I love Led Zeppelin and I like Billy Joel. (Pavement is the most consistent of the three; Zeppelin soared the highest; and I think Joel’s Turnstiles and The Stranger are masterpieces, but his later albums suffer by comparison.) So I was surprised to find that I liked So It Goes the most by far — especially since Joel was never as mysterious as Zeppelin or as effortlessly cool as Pavement. After seeing all three movies, I spent a few days listening to Joel’s albums, but I wasn’t tempted to put on Pavement, even though I listen to the band’s music far more often.  

I wasn’t alone in this. In the three weeks since the first part of the documentary premiered on HBO, Joel’s on-demand streaming in the U.S. is up more than 24% compared to the three weeks before its debut, according to Luminate. That’s up from about 16% in the week the first part of the movie came out, indicating that interest in Joel’s music only accelerated in the weeks following its premiere. In the three weeks after the release of Becoming Led Zeppelin, the band’s on-demand streaming in the U.S. rose 17% compared to three weeks in January, and the boost is even higher compared to late 2024. (Anticipation for the movie seemed to boost streams before its release, which didn’t happen for Joel.) Even Pavement, whose music and film are less popular, saw a 14% increase in the three weeks after the release of Pavements compared to the first three weeks in April.

This tracks how much I liked the movies. I found So It Goes incredibly compelling. It’s not especially innovative — it switches between shots of Joel sitting at his piano, telling his story and archival photos and videos — but he’s an engaging storyteller. He looks back at his past with honesty and a certain self-deprecating humor: “I did a lot of my own research for ‘Big Shot,’” he says, after calling it “a hangover song.”  

Parts of Joel’s story are much less funny. He struggled to find a style that worked for him, and he seems to carry some wounds from childhood: His father, the son of Jewish refugees from Germany, left his family and returned to Europe. Joel eventually found him, but they struggled to reconnect emotionally, and he vows to be a better dad. The movie implicitly makes a case for Joel as the heir to a certain songwriting tradition — a pop auteur who brings rock instrumentation and attitude to classic pop songwriting. It made me curious enough to listen again to some of his older albums. If I didn’t know his music, I think it would have the same effect.  

On the surface, at least, Led Zeppelin seems like a much more promising subject for a documentary. The band has few equals as a live act, and the performance footage in Becoming Led Zeppelin, which tells the story of the group through the release of its second album, is just stunning. The film smartly puts Zeppelin in context — watch enough music documentaries and you start to think people in the United Kingdom actually lived in black and white before Beatlemania — and it’s remarkable just how much the group turned up the volume on pop. The commentary from the bandmembers is far quieter, though — both literally and figuratively — because they are only seen on camera separately.  

Becoming Led Zeppelin also doesn’t deliver on the band’s legendary excess. Some of that took place later, and neither the band’s exploits with groupies nor its tendency to borrow liberally from blues artists plays well today. The group’s story is interesting, but there isn’t that much there that I didn’t know. The concert footage is so vital that it makes the rest seem slow by comparison, and the band members don’t look back with the humor that Joel does. To quote another Zeppelin film, “Does anyone remember laughter?”  

And then I got to Pavements, the movie I liked least, about the act I love most. It’s meant to be a rock-doc about rock-docs, in a way that some of Pavement’s songs were about songs — most famously “Cut Your Hair.” It’s about time someone did this. But Pavements underwhelms because it overdelivers. It’s a documentary about the band interwoven with a “documentary” about the show Slanted! Enchanted! A Pavement Musical, which played for two nights in 2022; a “documentary” about a museum exhibit about the band, which also existed; and a “documentary” about a nonexistent biopic. It’s a lot.  

Pavement deserves a documentary that punctures pop music pretensions, but this one has too much going on at once. Worse, for a band that oozed slacker charm, Pavements is just too conceptual — more polished jewel box than dusty trunk. One of the funnier lines comes from Butt-Head of Beavis & Butt-Head fame: “They need to try harder!” Maybe. But the movie tries way too hard — and when it works, the humor is so specific that it’s hard to imagine anyone who’s not familiar with the band will understand why they were so important to so many people. 

I’d love to end this with a grand theory on how to make music documentaries work, but I don’t have one. The closest I can get is that many listeners still want to know more about the person behind the music. So It Goes works because it delivers that. Becoming Led Zeppelin doesn’t, but it has enough fantastic live footage to interest anyone. Pavements doesn’t even try, because that was never the point of Pavement in the first place, and maybe that’s fine. Some things are just easier to sell than others.