Review: REM by MTV

by William Hill
★★½

The rock music documentary is an unsteady ground. It usually celebrated an artist while clarifying the usually rumor ridden histories of the musicians behind the songs. Sometimes it tells the completely untold stories behind a band that never really caught on. Going into REM by MTV,  released in 2014 but played through Fathom Events, I was confused by what about REM necessitated a documentary film. This confusion doesn't stem from any bias against the band, but rather from the fact that I've never met a dedicated REM fan in my life,  even while working in a record store.

Told through an assembled collection of old interviews and concert footage, as well as some still photos, REM by MTV tells the story of the alternative rock act from their roots as a band coming together in Athens, Georgia, recording several albums and finding success in throughout the late eighties and in the nineties. Almost all of the interviews are with the members of the band itself, and there are very few people from outside of their management that were there to tell the tale. On the positive side, it plays as a collection of personal stories, usually funny and heartfelt, and makes the guys easy tor relate to; a small town boys do well story, if you will. However, aside from a collection of hospital visits in 1996, there is little challenge to their rise to stardom. 

What REM by MTV tells us about the members of REM is that they took what they could do with music and pursued it, and avoided the pitfalls of drug abuse and egotism that often destroyed other successful bands. While this is a great moral for any musician to follow, it makes their story play out like fluff against other documentaries, such as Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage, where the storied power trio almost destroyed their career while sticking to their guns, only to come out of a dark period of their career to great success. There is no apparent challenge, and as a result, there isn't much of a narrative to the film, but rather a collection of short stories.

And while the stories can be entertaining, the pacing is shot as a result. A lack of cohesion is produced by what boils down to a film born of little other than editing. The interviews are all archival, drawn from old MTV footage, and, from what I can tell, little was filmed new for the film. The story is assembled and pieced together, but doesn't have a definitive idea of what it wants to do other than say "hey, these guys wrote some songs, made sociopolitical statements, got major surgery, and recorded some new music in the past few years".

This is disappointing, given that the personalities within REM were unique enough in their own right that a documentary about the people rather than the band history could have been much more interesting. Michael Stipe's eccentric personality could have been at the forefront of the story, especially since he was often the most interesting voice on screen, rattling off sheer madness from time to time, and is probably the most pretentious person in the group. Mind you, I agree with a lot of his sentiments about songwriting. 

Given the quality of other documentary films about rock musicians, it's a shame to see that REM couldn't have received the same treatment, but I'm not sure that they could have either. The simplicity of their history and the lack of great personal or professional difficulty makes their documentary a mediocre one at best, saved only by a great sense of humor displayed by the members of the band and admittedly decent pop tunes driving the plodding narrative along. It's probably best left to hardcore REM fans, wherever they may be. As for the average listener, you'd be best catching up on their back catalog and maybe reading some articles about them. The interviews collected for the film are probably all on YouTube anyway, as sad as it makes me to suggest that.