Bookended by a near-identical juxtaposition of sound and fury, directors Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace’s “Meet Me in the Bathroom” starts and ends like a messy, wannabe Jules Dassin cityscape film seen through a grunge filter. “Manhattan crowds with their turbulent musical chorus, Manhattan faces, and eyes, forever for me,” our narrator reads as we see riotous anger take to the streets. Following the evolution and rise of several now-legendary groups (in select circles) such as The Strokes, Interpol, TV on the Radio, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and LCD Soundsystem, ‘Bathroom,’ chronicles the journey of those in a musical movement who felt they were “slipping out of existence” and “didn’t have a place to play,” finding new direction and fame with the rise of the “anti-folk scene” in New York spots like the Mercury Lounge and Sidewalk Café.
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Beginning its focus on the band The Moldy Peaches, bedroom jam sessions, aerial and on the ground footage, percolate the beginning of the doc. ‘Bathroom’ then focuses on the rise of the aforementioned bands, although often getting its wires crossed in the editing via a lack of clarity about which group is being discussed.
Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs is undoubtedly the most interesting subject. “When you’re a halfie, you don’t fit in with the whites, and you don’t fit in with the Koreans,” life taught her, as well as the fact that “for men in rock, there’s a fucking code,” a macho code she had little desire to subscribe to. Soon she found herself writing six songs in one night, and, before she knew it, opening for The White Stripes.
After glossing over 9/11’s fallout with an Adam McKay-esque montage set to Frank Sinatra’s “It Was A Very Good Year,” that flashes Bush, Trump, Osama Bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein — images of chaotic jingoism and xenophobia taking over the doc randomly for a few minutes — the film hones in on The Strokes, Interpol, James Murphy of DFA Record’s inception of LCD Soundsystem, and the impact of Napster on the music industry.
Loosely inspired by the music book of the same name by Lizzy Goodman, there are your typical behind-the-scenes rock band finger-pointing betrayals, and, unfortunately (and somewhat troublingly), Ryan Adams shows up as a talking head without a single mention of the man’s predatory behavior (some of it reportedly involving underage girls). Yes, Adams, is a central figure in the original book, allegedly encouraging the heroin use of one of the Strokes’ members and generally feuding with the band. But considering you could easily dub him the Woody Allen of the Pitchfork generation, given the many distressing allegations of his behavior at the time, it seems incredibly short-sighted for a music documentary that spotlights a feminist rock god as one of its main subjects to include such a subject without that context.
The film briefly touches on the paradox of underground popularity and success and the pressures of exposure and sensationalism, but it’s too little too late. Karen O shares stories about photographers who were clearly trying to get upskirt shots of her crouch, but outside this tidbit, the doc never touches some of the issues of abuse and assault that the indie-rock business has been reckoning with in recent years. O is afforded a marvelous performance of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs song “Maps” towards the end of the film, captured in a single heart-rending close-up, but it’s the one authentic light of genuine performance expression in the entire movie (concert footage being prominent but not particularly inspired).
Ping ponging back and forth between ideas and subjects without much unifying focus outside the obvious connective tissue of the movement itself and a couple of interpersonal relationships, “Meet Me in the Bathroom” isn’t near as interesting, evocative, or intimately observed a doc as something like Todd Haynes’ recent “The Velvet Underground” rock doc. A few sections aim to interrogate whether artistic privilege afforded to creatives like Julian Casablancas is justified or entitled but fails to take a side (same goes for Napster and Interpol). The Strokes even admit to recording an album consisting of “the same songs, different arrangements,” almost as if they were trolling an audience that would download an entire leaked record (online piracy beginning to plague the industry during this era). “Pain and a drum machine” is all a generation needs to change an art scene, but “Meet Me in the Bathroom” feels like a surface-level music documentary with little mindfulness for creative expression or the shades of reality outside the fame of its subjects. [C/C-]
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