This film tracks the tumultuous rise of two talented musicians, Anton Newcombe, leader of the Brian Jonestown Massacre; and Courtney Taylor, leader of the Dandy Warhols; dissecting their star-crossed friendship and bitter rivalry. Both are hell-bent on staging a self-proclaimed revolution of the music industry. Through their loves and obsessions, gigs and recordings, arrests and death threats, uppers and downers—and ultimately to their chance at a piece of the profit-driven music business—how each handles his stab at success is where the relationship frays and burns. –IMDb
Ondi Timoner (1969-) is an American film director, producer and editor. She is the only director, along with her team, to win a Sundance grand jury award twice in the festival’s history.
Timoner graduated cum laude from Yale University and founded Interloper in 1995, and in 2004 incorporated it with Vasco Nunes into Interloper Films, LLC. She filmed the documentaries Voices From Inside Time about incarcerated women in Connecticut, winner of the Yale Film Prize – and later, The Nature of the Beast, about one woman’s heroic journey through the criminal justice system, and winner of the Bettina Russel Grand Jury Prize in Canada and The National Society for Visual Anthropology Commendation, which aired on PBS. She later went on to shoot Dam Nation, set in the oldest living civilization of sub-Saharan Africa about a WTO dam.
She created and directed for the TV series Sound Affects, the highest-rated pilot in VH1’s history, and ABC’s highly successful Switched!. Through Interloper… read more
people should stop trying to understand this just let it be what it is and BJM make some great music. rock and roll.
It's an interesting documentary for all the wrong reasons....neither of the bands is as great as the filmmaker wants them to look like. As a study in self destruction it would have worked great without the footage with The Dandy Warholes, because it really looks forced when you show Newcombe going through hell and then go "hey look how much fun they're having". And the biggest mistake is not showing his wife.....
Couldn't help but roll my eyes at all of the accolades given to BJM throughout the film. Though I like a lot of their music, they are essentially just late-comers to a psychedelic revival scene that would have been fine without them. No one featured in this film is a unique genius and certainly not a revolutionary. Still, between the fight scenes, drug use, and stupid people trying to sound smart, I was entertained.
