Critics reviews

The story of Big Star is one for the ages. This loving tribute is not.

This is what Nothing Can Hurt Me does best: gathering a multigenerational extended family of Memphis scenesters, musicians, artists, critics, and biological family members, all of whom have some connection to Big Star, thereby revealing the energy field that generated and nurtured the band through all its disappointments. Big Star were "too individual, too Memphis, too unrecoupable," Dickinson's widow concludes in the film, "but they changed music. They turned pain into beauty.

Big Star may not be the best introduction for those who don't yet have at least some passing familiarity with the bruised-knee wistfulness of songs like "Thirteen," or the quavery undersea despair of "Kangaroo." But for anyone already curious, Nothing Can Hurt Me delivers the goods.

This is a movie about how much rock critics, and to a lesser extent other musicians, love Big Star. The writers sit in front of staggeringly large CD collections and talk about how brilliant the songs are, while the songs are used as intros and background music. It takes a certain amount of nerve to cut off "The Ballad of El Goodo" after a few bars.

A well-sourced account of a perfect, broken dream, Drew DeNicola and Olivia Mori's slightly shaggy documentary captures what it's like to discover music so good it seems as if it were made just for you.

Whether this love letter is more preaching to the converted than a corrective is arguable, but if it gets one person to buy #1 Record…

It's Bell who emerges as the heartbreaking, touchstone figure of this group biography... Described as a seeker, but also as a man who seemed unimaginable as a mature adult given the obstacles of his mental illness, drug use, and conflicted sexuality, the pain and loneliness of Bell's short life are mirrored in the faces of his surviving siblings and the keening vocals of his piercing recordings.