Metacritic reviews

Lane set out to make a documentary about the nature of taste, and she’s accomplished that with panache.

Since Kenneth Gorelick isn’t actually interested in being separated from Kenny G, Lane’s real task becomes imbuing the aggregate with some stakes. And she crushes it: Listening to Kenny G gives you all your need-to-knows so that you can take or leave the titular musician as you see fit.

Even if you’d rather die than be trapped in a broken elevator with endless Kenny G music, Lane’s excellent accomplishment is making 97 minutes about the musician so much smart fun.

[Lane] proves yet again that nobody can tonally marry edification and entertainment onscreen so effortlessly. It’s masterful.

Ruthlessly entertaining ... Lane is a master archive digger, unearthing priceless artifacts, some damning, others endearing.

As a music industry story, Kenny G’s rise, engineered by the mogul Clive Davis but at times bucked by the artist himself, is fascinating.

It’s a very entertaining trip, but it doesn’t really go anywhere: If you go in loving Kenny G you’ll come out that way, and if you go in hating him you won’t change your mind.

It’s doubtful that die-hard Kenny haters will come away with a new understanding of or appreciation for the man. But for those curious about where he came from and those who want to consider why his beloved status rubs so many people the wrong way, there’s a lot to like.

There are points early in this documentary where you might wonder if it really needed to be a feature (one can imagine a cut-down "60 Minutes" piece doing the job just as effectively) but when Lane gets away from the man himself and focuses on the details of the business of music, a new frontier of understanding opens up.

Listening to Kenny G subtly and surely teases out the mighty and overarching idea of the inseparability of the artist and the art, the notion of art as the embodiment of the artist’s personality—for better or for worse.