There’s a scene in the HBO Original Love to Love You, Donna Summer, which recently premiered on Max, in which the titular songstress is seen via home-video recordings crooning a ballad at her personal piano, sans makeup or adornments. It spotlights the so-called queen of disco in her essential element as a deeply feeling artist. The private performance typifies how a thoughtfully realized music documentary can not only bring icons into our living rooms, but ours into theirs. When done well, a cinematic summary of a legendary artist’s life and times can collapse the boundary between fan and luminary, offering clarity and communion.
Love to Love You, co-directed by Summer’s daughter Brooklyn Sudano and filmmaker Roger Ross Williams, is one of several revealing and stylish music docs currently streaming on Max that merit a watch. Here’s a tip sheet for which ones qualify for a spot atop your queue.
Love to Love You, Donna Summer (2023)
Thanks to Sudano’s immediate involvement (her father and Donna’s husband/collaborator Bruce Sudano is also onscreen frequently), Love to Love You is extraordinarily intimate. Grainy camcorder archives of the late singer hamming it up in hotel rooms with her sisters — who served as her backup vocalists in studio and on tour — contrasts with surreptitiously captured moments of she and Bruce making out when they thought no one was spying. Sudano and Williams cut back and forth from those still slices of life to footage of Summer as the outsized diva of R&B and disco who dominated pop charts and concert stages for a solid decade and evolved from bohemian cast member of Hair to titillating chanteuse and born-again Christian focused on the good fortune of family. Neither simplistic hagiography nor sensational exposé, Love to Love You is an overdue re-examination of a pigeonholed musician who contained multitudes.
Jason Isbell: Running With Our Eyes Closed (2023)
Part of HBO’s deeply personalized Music Box series, the HBO Original Running With Our Eyes Closed isn’t terribly preoccupied with converting new Isbell fans. It’s primarily dedicated to giving the Drive-By Truckers guitarist turned solo alt-country troubadour and his wife/bandmate Amanda Shires a space to reflect on the rigors of addiction, recovery, marriage, and self-actualization. Director Sam Jones either caught the couple at the right time or diligently earned their trust, but Running With Our Eyes Closed functions in part as catharsis for both Isbell and Shires, who share unsparing anxieties about their belief in themselves and each other. All of which allows the viewer to experience snippets of recording rehearsals and live sets through a remarkably raw lens.
DMX: Don’t Try to Understand (2021)
Another Music Box standout, HBO Original Don’t Try to Understand premiered seven months after DMX’s untimely death due to a heart attack at 50 years old. That context makes Joseph Cassiere’s film — which follows the rapper’s attempts to get his life and career back on track after serving a year in prison for tax evasion — a heartbreaking elegy for what could have been. The DMX we see throughout Don’t Try is by turns funny, familial, furious, and forlorn, fully representative of the complex presence he put on wax over a historic run of chart-topping albums in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The emotional core of the movie arrives when DMX pulls up at his childhood housing project in Yonkers, New York (where a wall mural of him now watches over the parking lot). His desire to lift himself and the building residents out of low times and toward greatness is palpable, and when he rivets the crowd with a patented clipped, rasped freestyle set of bars, it’s a stunning and bittersweet testament to his soulful gifts. As any music doc worth its watch time ought to do, and despite its standoffish title, Don’t Try to Understand places DMX’s mindset and music within our grasp.
Tina (2021)
Near the end of the HBO Original Tina, a recording from a 1985 interview provided by Tina Turner biographer Kurt Loder plays back the late rock ‘n’ roll pioneer reflecting, “I’m a girl from a cotton field that pushed myself above what was not taught to me.” As fans of the singer, who passed away at age 83 this spring, are well aware, those self-taught lessons included how to escape an abusive marriage and evolve into a self-possessed powerhouse who could claim the throne of pop stardom in middle-age. Tina is, viewed side-by-side with the other documentaries on this list, close to conventionally chronological and formatted around numerous on-camera interviews, including with Turner herself. But what sets Tina apart is its willingness — with Turner’s blessing — to deconstruct not only the glamor, but the oversimplified aura that she conquered her past and put it behind her. The truth is it shadowed her to the end, and she worked overtime not merely to sell records and sell out arenas, but to erect a legacy that would tower over the tumult in her life. Directors Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin make sure of that with their deeply human, eponymously titled two-hour review.
Moonage Daydream (2023)
Anyone acquainted with director Brett Morgen’s previous rock-docs, including Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck and Crossfire Hurricane, knows he prefers an eclectic, non-linear format. He may have found his perfect muse in David Bowie, whose fluidity as a singer/songwriter/actor and cult of personality defined his half-century of fame while alive. Clocking in at more than two hours, the HBO Original Moonage Daydream consolidates his high-watermarks of influence tidily enough. But Morgen’s biggest achievement is illustrating — via a visual cut-up technique — the consistency of his subject’s commitment to wholly immersive artistry and unapologetic entertainment. That, plus the film’s admiration for Bowie’s singular physical features, which framed and facilitated his movements and music with the same intensity that Morgan translates Bowie’s sound and vision.
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