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Review: Beastie Boys Story gently mocks the artifice of showbiz culture

BEASTIE BOYS STORY (Spike Jonze). 119 minutes. Streaming on Apple TV+ Friday (April 24). Rating: NNNN


Beastie Boys Story is exactly what it says on the tin: a story about the Beastie Boys, told by the two surviving members of the New York hip-hop trio to a theatre full of their adoring, middle-aged fans.

If you’re part of that demographic, you’ll want to check it out, and you’ll probably have a good time watching it. You might also get the sense that Mike D and Ad-Rock are giving you a polished, practiced version of their truth, with the rougher edges shaved down and the moments of piercing honesty placed at strategic intervals – starting with an acknowledgment of their missing third, the late Adam “MCA” Yauch.

It’s the Beasties’ version of those An Evening With… celebrity storytelling events, where megastars share themselves in an intimate and interactive setting – which is to say, this one is aware of how phony those things can be, and neither Mike Diamond nor Adam Horovitz really hides the fact that the anecdotes they’re sharing are scripted and rehearsed.

That said, Beastie Boys Story is phony on the Beasties’ very specific terms, gently mocking the artifice of showbiz culture – the meaningful pauses, the embarrassing photos, the manicured moments of honesty – while still keeping things real. These are the guys who dressed themselves up as a bar mitzvah band on tour, after all, and who couldn’t quite hide how much fun they were having pretending to be in a terrible cop show in the Sabotage video. They’re older now, and the passage of time has made them respectable, but they’re still wiseasses.

It’s not too long into the performance before they’re arguing with offstage director Spike Jonze about the teleprompter feeding them the wrong text, which is both a clever way of breaking the fourth wall and a subtle acknowledgement of the artificiality of two guys just fondly remembering the good old days in front of several hundred strangers.

Beastie Boys Story was shot at the Kings Theatre in Brooklyn last April, the final stop on the modest tour Horovitz and Diamond took after the publication of their excellent, eclectic 2018 Beastie Boys Book. The stage show functions as a sort of speed-read of that scrapbook memoir, taking us chronologically through the bullet points of the band’s origins and evolution with plenty of behind-the-scenes documentation.

Those bullet points aren’t entirely conventional, since the Beasties defied the standard Behind The Music model by getting their rise-and-fall narrative out of the way in their first few years. And as Horovitz and Diamond tell it, they were pretty conflicted about that rise in the first place: the band’s first smash, (You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party!), was a joke single embraced by the frat-boy hordes it was written to mock, and its success forced the Beasties to pretend to be those jerkasses full-time for a year or so. (The booze and drugs didn’t exactly help them stay on the right side of the jerkass line, either.)

The commercial and critical failure of their second album Paul’s Boutique in 1989 led the band to take some time apart, and when they got back together to make 1992’s Check Your Head, it was the work of three people who knew who they were and what they wanted. The Beasties stayed together for the next 20 years, until Yauch’s death in 2012 – and, it’s implied, Diamond and Horovitz used a lot of that time to catch up to Yauch’s curiosity, maturity and artistry.

That’s the most interesting aspect of Beastie Boys Story, and it’s where the documentary sets itself apart from the book: Yauch may be gone, but he isn’t fully absent from the stage show. Archival interviews are dropped in at key moments so he can provide his own commentary on the narrative Diamond and Horovitz are spinning, and of course he’s always fully present in the band’s music and lyrics: the show’s best sequence arrives when Diamond and Horovitz explain how Sabotage developed from a bass line Yauch played for them one afternoon out of nowhere, eventually shaped into a song when Horovitz recorded himself shouting at a friend.

It’s a fun glimpse into the random synaptic miracle of a pop-culture moment, sure, but it’s also a moment where we’re allowed to appreciate just how skilled these guys are. They started out as shouters who were quick with a rhyme, and developed into musicians and lyricists with distinct creative personalities.

To hear Diamond and Horovitz tell it, there wouldn’t have been a band at all without Yauch – or with drummer Kate Schellenbach, who co-founded the early punk version of the band with Yauch, Diamond and John Berry – but he was also the Beastie who kept them all moving forward. It was Yauch, famously, who took a feminist stance in 1994’s Sure Shot – implicitly calling out the band’s previous dick-forward posturing – and whose spiritual interests led him to Buddhism and his creation of the Tibet Freedom Concerts.

What’s also interesting to notice, as Beastie Boys Story rolls along, is that the dissolution of the band after Yauch’s death in 2012 has had the effect of freezing the Beasties’ personae in time whenever Diamond and Horovitz slip back into character to re-enact a specific moment, it’s like their past and present selves have struck a truce with each other. They’d probably reject the comparison, but I kept thinking of what Bob Dylan said in My Back Pages: I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.

That’s the same feeling audiences are chasing, and which Jonze – who co-wrote the stage show with Horovitz and Diamond, and who directed this film version – evokes at strategic points throughout Beastie Boys Story. Jonze had intended the documentary to play in IMAX venues, so his angles and editing are often calculated to overwhelm a viewer seated in front of a massive screen… but it works just fine at a smaller scale, where the home-movie footage and grainy analog MTV clips feel right at home – and are probably a lot easier on the eyes.

I mean, I’d love to have seen the definitive Beasties retrospective Yauch’s alter-ego Nathanial Hörnblowér might have made, but of course that never happened. Beastie Boys Story is the next best thing, a warm and occasionally moving look back at three best friends from New York who made some music, had some fun, fucked up a little but did their best to fix it and made the world a little bit better.

And yes, I know Paul’s Boutique was eventually recognized as a masterpiece. Jonze, Diamond and Horovitz know it too, and they have a little fun with that fact over the end credits. You’ll want to stick around for it.

@normwilner

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