The resurgent indie rock scene in New York at the millennium’s turn is the focus of this interestingly un-nostalgic documentary, based on an oral history of the same title by Lizzy Goodman – and the title is in fact that of a song by the Strokes, inspired by lead singer Julian Casablancas’s rumoured relationship with Courtney Love.
The movie revives the memory of white-hot NYC bands in their pouting pomp: the Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Rapture and Interpol, and contextualises them with the global tragedy of 9/11 and the growing upheavals in New York and the music industry itself. Bands who sang of passion, rage, anxiety and dislocation found they were right in the middle of an undreamt-of new zeitgeist; knocked sideways by the attack on the World Trade Center, they found themselves part of an exodus away from Manhattan to then down-at-heel Brooklyn, so kicking off the gentrification and hipsterfication of that borough.
