Directed on Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern
Featuring: The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, LCD Soundsystem, Interpol, and more bands from the early 00s NYC music scene
Running Time: 1 hour and 45 minutes
Opens November 4th at the IFC Center in New York and the Los Feliz Theatre in Los Angeles

by Ian Hrabe, Staff Writer

Whether it was your thing or not, it was impossible to avoid the emergence of the Strokes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs at the turn of the century. As a pouting 15-year-old punk rocker, I vividly remember seeing the Strokes video for “Last Nite” on MTV—for those not born in the Stone Age, MTV used to play music videos—and my immediate reaction was visceral: these guy suck. They were posers. They were absolutely not for me. One of my best friends was a huge Strokes guy and even his assurance that their debut album Is This It was excellent, I scoffed. A couple years later I checked out Yeah Yeah Yeahs based on the considerable buzz they were receiving from Pitchfork (I had since transitioned to insufferable indie rock snob by then) and again, I scoffed. It wasn’t until I was working a minimum wage job at a used CD/DVD store after graduating college in the late 00s that the stuff from the New York Scene got through to me. That whole sad six-month stretch of my life started each working day with the Strokes’ Is This It blasting on the store radio as I counted the money and switching over to their sophomore LP Room on Fire when the store opened. I finally got it. 

And then all of those dominos from NYC’s rock and roll revival started falling into place. Interpol were still ripping of Joy Division, but my snobbery had ebbed, and I was able to really get into their first couple records (their second album Antics has survived many purges of my LP collection). TV on the Radio—the one band from that scene I whole-heartedly loved—became an even bigger favorite. It was weird, but sometimes you just need to put a little distance between something before properly grappling with it. We’ve all hated a movie upon its release, and then suddenly had it click upon a second viewing years down the line when our circumstances had changed. I still listen to those first two Strokes records on the regular, and while I didn’t read Lizzie Goodman’s book on the scene, I was pretty pumped to check out this doc when I heard about it. And I was pretty bummed when it turned out to be a surface level look at that scene that made everyone look just as obnoxious as I imagined them to be. 

Told exclusively in archive footage with voice overs from the primary players of the scene, Meet Me in the Bathroom doesn’t really have anything interesting to say. It’s a brisk play-by-play of the rise and fall of the bands involved that rebuffs every opportunity to dig deeper than the surface level. The film jumps around without any rhyme or reason making the whole affair feel disjointed, and there’s a bizarre nothingburger montage in the middle of the movie set to Frank Sinatra’s “When I Was 17” where I felt like my skin was going to cringe off of my body. One of the biggest issues is that none of these bands knew how to talk to reporters, so there’s a lot of watching Julian Casablancas from the Strokes give what appears to be the worst interview you’ve ever seen, only to be followed by an interview that is somehow even worse. That’s not his fault though, as the filmmakers could have shown one to illustrate the whole “these guys had no idea how to talk to reporters” bit and been done but it happens over and over and over to the point where the people in these bands seem like total doofuses. 

The one character who ends up coming out clean is Karen O, who gets an actual narrative thread that shows her humble origins playing open mic nights to becoming one of the most iconic frontwomen of all time. The film is at its best when it’s letting Ms. O talk about how different it was for her in that scene, and all the problems that come with being a woman in rock and roll, and that’s really the only interesting thing this film has to say. The rest is just archival footage of bratty twenty-somethings doing bratty things. TV on the Radio gets about three minutes before the film shifts back to more terrible Strokes interviews. The segment on James Murphy’s descent into dance music and the formation of LCD Soundsystem starts promising but goes off the rails with a montage that illustrates “James Taking Ecstasy for the First Time and Falling in Love with Dance Music.” It’s the sort of embarrassing that makes your whole body feel like it’s clenching like a fist. This isn’t really Murphy’s fault, but the filmmaking makes him come across like an obnoxious hipster and, well, yeah he probably has some of that in him, but he’s always seemed more down-to-earth in other interviews and media. 

The film’s tack is basically saying, “ISN’T THIS COOL?!?!?!” and the main takeaway is that it would be a lot cooler if we actually got to know any of these people. Julian Casablancas is as close as this thing gets to a main character, and we get about 30 seconds of his rich kid upbringing and his shitty dad (a modeling management mogul) before the movie moves onto something else. It’s like, “Wait! That was actually interesting!” and then it’s gone. Replaced with innocuous sequences of world tours, too-long clips of live performances, and the other b-roll footage you get in rock docs. Music documentaries are pretty hard to screw up, so it’s kind of shocking how directors Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern managed to make such an exciting time in rock music seem so bland. There’s no life in this thing and the end result feels closer to a high schooler's YouTube compilation video than a feature film.