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Musicians from documentary films. Credit: composite: Mashable / images: Shutterstock. > Entertainment > Movies.

The choice between motherhood and work, or whether or not to even ask the question if there is a choice to be made between motherhood and work, is not the sort of question you expect a rock-and-roll documentary to address, but that’s what makes Michael Gracey’s 2021 film about singer and trapeze enthusiast P!nk such an interesting piece. I need somebody to throw a blanket over my shoulders and carry me off after just watching him do his thing; I don’t know if I’ll ever understand how he managed to pull off such performances. These rock gods are a little long in the tooth by now; the Stones performing in 2006 isn’t exactly the Stones performing in 1969, and neither is the audience, ya dig? Many of the best music docs catch their directors nerding out on a thing that they nerdily love and that they nerdily want to share with the world. Luckily, Jarmusch never exhausts its subject (or viewers) like Edgar Wright’s ode to the Sparks Brothers did; like the succinct songs that the Stooges penned, Gimme Danger is in and out before you even notice, leaving you satisfactorily dazed in its wake. (Germs lead singer Darby Crash was photographed for the poster shortly before killing himself.) This film is the first of a trilogy, followed by 1988's hairspray-heavy The Decline of Western Civilization Part II:The Metal Years ( also available free on Prime) and 1998's Part III ( available to rent on Prime), which focuses on homeless street punks. As it stands, Doug Pray’s 1996 doc looking back on the pan-flash popularity of the grunge scene and the way it changed an entire city reads today like the Rosetta Stone of Gen X texts, with all of its talking heads – including several adorable pre-teen tykes who go on about “The Man!” – encapsulating that moment’s precise vibe of natty thrift-store clothes and the anti-capitalist leanings behind them. Penelope Spheeris (Suburbia, Wayne's World) directs this truly legendary document of Los Angeles’s punk rock scene at the tail end of the 1970s, featuring performances by Black Flag, X, Alice Bag Band, the Circle Jerks, and Germs so visceral your skin might break out in hives, alongside truly unforgettable interviews with the sweaty, sneering audiences all sticking safety-pins through places you don’t wanna know. Executive produced by Martin Scorsese, Amir Bar-Lev’s 2017 documentary on the Grateful Dead clearly took its cues from the infamously long-running traveling jam band it set out to document, with a final runtime of nearly four hours. The intimacy comes across in the interviews that Lowenstein conducted over the course of a decade with INXS’s remaining band members and even more notably with Hutchence’s girlfriends, especially singer Kylie Minogue, who shares some remarkable personal footage from their romance. Maybe somebody died too young, or maybe somebody fell in or out of love, or maybe somebody bit the head off a bat. Music, ever intangible, is made a little less so by these movies.