Meet Me in the Bathroom

I have been anxiously awaiting this film, and it really let me down. I wanted to feel the excitement of this time and place and as soon as I would start to, it walked it back and jumped subjects, losing any momentum. These bands defined my early adulthood, at a time when things were really chaotic. But this film was chaotic in a different and uninspired way. I couldn't tap into the nostalgia I was hoping for, and it left me really sad and almost angry because there was so much potential and it could have been so much more.

I'm also disappointed that they gave Ryan Adams any kind of screen time, while giving next to nothing to TV on the Radio. They deserve their own movie. And so does Karen O, who was a bright spot in a really lackluster movie.

An exciting and well documented journey through the New York music scene that emerged in the 2000s, which has The Strokes at its center but includes various artists such as Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, The Rapture, The Moldy Peaches and LCD Soundsystem to complete the context and show us a bigger picture.

The story is told through different testimonies and approached from different angles, generating an agile and cinematically beautiful narrative.

A good way to better understand how the scene was built, the people behind the artists and the fact that fame is just a state and that rock stars are human too.

Not that it's exactly comparable, but I grew up very much amidst a folk music scene with loads of extremely mediocre working-class musicians - ballad singers, guitarists, fiddlers etc., who all thought they would go on to some sort of musical greatness. Watching this, it's good to know that those ridiculous pipe dreams were not just confined to Glasgow in the 1970s. Spool on to the early naughties and we are presented with a collection of "musicians" living in Yew York City with aspirations that in the vast majority of cases way outstripped their talents. The one exceptions is probably Julian Casablancas, who managed with "The Strokes" to get his head above the parapet of bland noisemaking, and here the documentary is quite potent at illustrating that the stresses of achieving and building on success are actually just as tough as those involved in getting noticed in the first place. On a more generic level, it does point out how tough this industry is, how hard people work to achieve little better than a subsistence existence and at just how transitory and fickle it all can be, but I did tire a little of the also-rans who whined on about sexploitation and objectification as if they'd had been living under a rock for most of their lives. They dreamt of success and acknowledgement in an industry that was/is riddled with sexualisation and somehow it came as a shock to them - pissed and stoned as they invariably were. Real talent is the best fast-track to initiate meaningful and lasting change. It's an interesting fly-on-the-wall style of production with loads of archive, busily edited to leave us with an authentic-looking view on the lives of these people, but I felt most of them really had no idea what they were doing and the fact that 9/11 occurred midway through the chronology of the narrative seemed merely designed to attempt to bedrock this otherwise flighty and shallow assessment of a music industry that took me back to those nights in the pub, with the folk singers who sounded great after eight pints, but who had no shelf-life beyond that!

I grew up watching those bands and I remember what the media used to say about them, that they were going to save rock music.

But now after 2 decades... Yeah, they were just kids. We were just kids. Really, I was literally a kid. And I'm from Brazil and could relate to them so I thought I would be all emotional and so on.

It was nice to see the bands but there's a lot of unnecessary drama and white-rocker-men-from-new-york-problems'.

Maybe we're not just grown up but grew out of all of this so niched and dated scene from the past.

Anyway, maybe with a short edit and a more developed story from Karen O, for instance it would be better to watch.

Overrall, it was 6/10 and worth for the nostalgia.

A loose, informal-looking document of a time and place and the idiosyncratic music they served as backdrop to, "Meet Me in the Bathroom" is a glimpse into the Rock music scene of New York City at the turn of the century. Amidst the reality of Y2K, 9/11, Napster and George W. Bush Jr. The film shows how long dead Rock n' Roll came to life in the Big Apple when bands like The Strokes, Interpol, LCD Soundystem, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and a host of others kept a dying genre in life support by creating some of the most eclectic and compelling music in all of music.

Filled with interviews from the bands themselves and their associates and archival footage this takes one back to that cold, chilly and impersonal time. From the sensational hype-driven attention given to the scene-igniting and influential Strokes to the rare female-fronted act of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Dance-Electronic punkisms of LCD Soundsystem and the soulful experimentalism of TV on the Radio, on to the Anti-Folk quirkiness of The Moldy Peaches to the rocking danceability of The Rapture and the cool distant approach of Interpol the movie features a constellation of young hopefuls whose talents coalesced into a particular age and era when NU Metal and Hip-Hop dominated the global music scene, music that were the opposite of what they were doing, these underrated luminaries toiling and creating in a time that neither cared about them nor gave them their due.

While watchable the film lacks perspective on what truly matter. A good chronological backdrop on the history of the New York Rock scene would have fleshed this out more and would have given more of an understanding on what the bands featured have done and what they accomplished. And most of all and what the filmmakers glaringly missed which is what the film is basically about: the music! Too much emphasis is given on the personalities involved that the main reason why they even got to be featured here is sidelined and how good even great the music actually is.

Based on journalist Lizzy Goodman's tome of the same name, "Meet Me in the Bathroom" is a celebration of Gen X's and New York Rock's final hurrah before fading into the eventual eclipse of time and memory. A tribute to a great artistic legacy and a great city this is one Rock fans should see.