Courtesy Vinyl Films
Pearl Jam front-man Eddie Vedder in a rare moment of solitude, in a scene from Pearl Jam Twenty.
Throughout director Cameron Crowe's admirably stuffed Pearl Jam Twenty, pain is a recurring motif.
There's the matter of the Seattle band's founding -- in the devastating wake of Mother Love Bone vocalist Andrew Wood's overdose. There's the very public, very lonely grappling with Ticketmaster in the mid-'90s. There's the heartbreaking tragedy of the nine deaths at the Roskilde festival in 2000.
And those are just the external elements -- never mind that Pearl Jam is ceaselessly asking why it's being singled out from its early-'90s contemporaries, torn between the rewards of fame as well as the heavy costs. It's all very heady, heavy stuff, if not for the glorious release found in making music, which Pearl Jam Twenty celebrates in fittingly messy fashion.
Although the line-up has shifted over 20 years, the core of Pearl Jam -- its fractious, deeply loving nucleus -- has always been Eddie Vedder, Jeff Ament, Stone Gossard and Mike McCready (Matt Cameron is the latest in a revolving door line-up of drummers). And it's the bond these men continue to share that forms the spine of Crowe's absorbing two-hour documentary, a must for fans of the band and a worthwhile watch even for those who can't sing Daughter off the tops of their heads.
Arguably, even Pearl Jam Twenty's expansive amount of time is not enough to adequately dive into all that's transpired during Pearl Jam's tumultuous two-decade existence. (Hopefully, somewhere down the line, the band will submit to a multi-hour, multi-part film, not unlike the sort Martin Scorsese created about Bob Dylan and, more recently, George Harrison.) The rock band exploded onto the scene just as the mainstream was discovering "grunge" and Nirvana and Soundgarden, which is a full, multi-part documentary in and of itself. Thankfully, Crowe (who serves as occasional narrator) takes pains to show that the manufactured rivalries between the bands were just that: fictions used to spur interest in a burgeoning scene in the Pacific Northwest.
But for every considered section like that, there's less depth in examining just how explosively Pearl Jam's career began (for my money, the one-two punch of Ten and Vs. has yet to be equaled) and a tendency to cross-cut between an endless series of gigs and backstage antics. The breadth of archival footage is really impressive, but a little more context from either the filmmaker or the band members would make it a much richer experience. (That said, Crowe is unafraid to push the interview subjects into a few dark corners, resulting in some moving moments.)
It's endearing to see how the band members are collectively so bemused by how they've survived ups and downs (and each other) to make it past the 20-year mark. Although no one in the film ever comes right out and says it, the simple reason for that longevity is cleverly hinted at in the film's final segment: Footage from a 2010 concert in New York City, with the audience singing along to Better Man and Alive, word for word. The look on Vedder's face as scans the room, distractedly playing his electric guitar, pretty much sums it up: "I don't know how I got here, but I wouldn't want to be anywhere else."
Pearl Jam Twenty airs tonight at 8 p.m. on KERA (and again on Oct. 28).
