Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
A documentary on the once promising American rock bands The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols. The friendship between respective founders, Anton Newcombe and Courtney Taylor, escalated into bitter rivalry as the Dandy Warhols garnered major international success while the Brian Jonestown Massacre imploded in a haze of drugs.
Dig! is a genuinely singular music documentary — its years-long fly-on-the-wall access to two bands on wildly diverging trajectories, anchored by the magnetic and self-destructive Anton Newcombe, gives it an almost novelistic quality rare in the genre. The parallel rise-and-fall structure is compelling and the footage captured is often jaw-dropping in its candor. Cinematography is rough and handheld by necessity, functional but not distinguished. The 'acting' dimension — really the subjects' performances of themselves — is vivid and entertaining if occasionally exhausting. The ending is satisfying without being tidy, reflecting real life's ambiguity. Its novelty is its greatest asset: there is genuinely no other music documentary quite like it.