The 25 best music documentaries of all time

Not if you spend all day holed up in your room obsessively analyzing the lyrics of Radiohead’s OK Computer it isn’t. Fortunately, the band’s fans can use this hypnotic backstage-at-the-tour documentary as an excuse to get social.

Jack White, the Edge and Jimmy Page team up, trade licks and supply general awesomeness in Davis Guggenheim’s guitar documentary, also a primer on three essential bands.

The place is Kinshasa, Zaire, 1974—a three-day celebration of black music tied to the mythic “Rumble in the Jungle” boxing match. Director Jeffrey Levy-Hinte probes the idea of black power from a fascinating variety of perspectives, not all of them utopian.

Beyhive, assemble! Beyonce initially cancelled her inaugural Coachella appearance in 2017, only to return a year later and deliver one of the most bombastic headlining sets the festival has ever seen. If you’ve ever questioned whether the over-the-top devotion of her fanbase is justified, this bracingly shot concert film should erase all doubt.

Juxtaposing archival band footage with everything from stop-motion dinosaur flicks to Laurence Olivier’s onscreen portrayal of Richard III, Julian Temple depicts the Pistols’ tempestuous two-year history via sensory assault, so that the movie often feels less like a documentary than like a prolonged, vaguely coherent soapbox rant. (That’s a compliment.)

Turning the spotlight on several career backup singers, director Morgan Neville shows that, in the music industry, it’s rarely talent that ends up separating the superstars from the relative unknowns. Artists like Merry Clayton, Darlene Love and Lisa Fischer may have never made what Bruce Springsteen calls ‘the long walk’ from the back of the stage to the front, but they have voices (and personalities) as big as Aretha’s and Mariah’s – and here, at least, they get to show them off.

Forget the patchy biopic: this doc on the fast-burning life and tragic death of Amy Winehouse is the only film anyone needs to see on the brilliant but troubled neo-soul singer. It’s a sensitively handled but also brutally honest examination of the spiral of addiction and the toxicity of fame.

If you had to pick a point where Madonna became Madonna, it would be the overripe Blonde Ambition tour, captured in this warts-and-all documentary featuring then-boyfriend Warren Beatty, wryly commenting from the wings.

Rock critics tossed breathless superlatives at Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Sam Jones’s account of that album's uncertain creation has an attribute that makes it well worth seeing by even nonfans: It's shot in black-and-white and charged by some iconically luscious images.

“Led Zeppelin is overexplained; the Beatles are overexplained,” says the Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan. Instead, he and other superfans set the record straight about the revered (if deeply uncool) Canadian power trio. The result is an exhilarating career history, and also a testament to going your own way.

The story of how Detroit musician Sixto Rodriguez went from ultra-obscure 1970s folk singer to hero of the Anti-Apartheid movement 8000 miles away in South Africa is fascinating enough. Considering how this Oscar-winning doc ended up sparking a late-career resurgence for its subject, it then becomes one of the greatest tales of rediscovery in music history – documentaries of any stripe are rarely so life-affirming.

Filmed over two nights and somehow cut together when he was making The King of Comedy, Martin Scorsese captures the fondest of farewells for The Band – with a little help from some friends (Joni Mitchell, Muddy Waters, Neil Young et al). It sounds great and looks as good as you'd expect from a doc shot by two legendary cinematographers, Laszlo Kovacs and Vilmos Zsigmond.

A seminal time capsule of glam rock at its glammiest, D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary on the final concert of Bowie playing the leper messiah with the snow-white tan captures the performer in prime peacock mode.

For their October 2004 MSG concerts, the Beastie Boys circulated 50 Minicams among the bumptious crowd, resulting in a kinetic, undeniably sloppy testament to fan-idol collaboration.

Patron saint of lo-fi music and home-recording enthusiast Daniel Johnston has written some of the most bizarrely sweet and catchy pop songs you’re ever likely to hear. As this documentary demonstrates, he’s got some pretty serious mental problems as well. A solid portrait of genius as filtered through insanity.

Enjoy the legendary performances and casual nudity without having to wallow in mud or endure the random outbursts of acid casualties.

A unique mix of concert film and road movie, DA Pennebaker’s doc follows eight strangers as they pile into a bus and travel across the country to see their favourite band, synth-pop giants Depeche Mode, perform at California’s Rose Bowl. In applying his cinema verite approach to fans rather than idols, Pennebaker essentially invented reality TV, while also enshrining the moment when four pasty leather boys from Essex seemed as big as The Beatles.  

This dazzling docu-odyssey through the life and music of David Bowie from Montage of Heck director Brett Morgen is an ultra-vivid collage of performances, personas and philosophies – all fuelled by the extraterrestrial energy of Bowie himself. Play it really loud. 

Oasis vs Blur? Michael Jackson vs Prince? Drake vs Kendrick? All great musical rivalries, but for pure madness, none can touch the Dandy Warhols and Brian Jonestown Massacre. Director Ondi Timoner tracked the indie-rock up-and-comers for seven years as their careers diverged and a close friendship curdled into bitter resentment. It’s silly, shocking and sometimes poignant, and populated with characters you couldn’t make up because no one would believe they could exist. The film’s cultural footprint is big enough to have warranted a 20th anniversary cut, Dig! XX, featuring additional rock’n’roll mayhem.

The world’s biggest metal band suffers through member defection, group therapy and rehab stints. This rockumentary may be the funniest, most daringly exposed profile of a music group ever captured on film.

Woodstock, schmoodstock! Jimi Hendrix was in much better form at the first great ’60s rock festival, an event well captured by doc legend D.A. Pennebaker (with some help from Albert Maysles) in a film that also features performances by Janis Joplin, the Jefferson Airplane and the Who.

Woodstock, Monterey Pop and Wattstax have all been long-enshrined on film, but the six-week Harlem Cultural Festival is the great forgotten concert event of the 1960s. In this Oscar-winning act of restoration, Roots drummer and first-time director Ahmir ‘Questlove’ Thompson underscores brilliant live footage from the likes of Sly and the Family Stone, Stevie Wonder and Nina Simone with important cultural and sociopolitical context, linking the past to the present with a resonance few music docs ever manage to muster.

It’s the Stones in their prime, singing hits like “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Under My Thumb,” but it’s the way the directors captured the collapse of ’60s idealism—and a murder—that make this one of the best rock docs ever.

It’s hard to say which is more riveting: scenes of Bob Dylan performing such classics as “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” or scenes in which Dylan unleashes his acid tongue on hapless reporters who just want a few good quotes.

Any band can go onstage and play the hits, but Talking Heads were never just any band. From David Byrne opening with ‘Psycho Killer’ backed only by a boombox, to the famous big suit, to the tango with a lamp on ‘This Must Be the Place’, the aesthetics in Jonathan Demme’s superlative concert film are nearly as iconic as the music. Make no mistake, though: the music is phenomenal, with the band operating at its peak and Parliament-Funkadelic keyboard genius Bernie Worrell as their secret weapon.