09/03/2023 - Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern’s documentary about the New York punk rock scene in the early 2000s is an engaging journey back to a time before the world changed forever

Exploring the emergence of the last and most significant wave of punk rock before the world changed forever, before smartphones, social networks and Spotify upended habits, aesthetics and the global music industry, Meet Me In The Bathroom, the new documentary by the British directorial duo Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern (who previously gave us No Distance Left to Run, about Blur, and Shut Up and Play the Hits, dedicated to LCD Soundsystem) has the flavour of a journey through time, being based entirely on archive images of New York from the early 2000s and of the young bands who took centre stage on the underground music scene at the time; a scene which saw groups such as The Strokes, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, LCD Soundsystem and The Moldy Peaches spread their wings and take flight.

The film was presented in a premiere at Sundance 2022 and, having toured a variety of festivals such as the 9^th Seeyousound International Music Film Festival in Turin, on what turned out to be one of the most popular and warmest evenings of the event, it’s now due to be released in British and Irish cinemas on 10 March, courtesy of Dogwoof Pictures.

From the very outset, the film connects the artists it spotlights with the environment they were shaped by. Viewers are thrust into Manhattan in 1999, amidst celebrations for the impending new millennium, neuroses over a potential Millennium Bug and a handful of young people looking for the right place to play their music in. Amateur photos and videos, shot in the earliest digital formats, capture those who would go on to captivate adoring crowds around the world with their sound (Julian Casablancas, Karen O and Paul Banks, to name only a few), and depict them taking their first steps in this world, musicians who were little more than passionate, easy-going, genuine teens, which now seems a thing of the past in today’s marketing-centric world.

Combined with videos of concerts and interviews from the time, this unseen footage is alternated with images of the city from back then (the movie’s incredibly dynamic editing comes courtesy of Andrew Cross and Sam Rice-Edwards), including the tragic events of 11 September 2001 – and Brooklyn too, the city to which many of these young artists moved after the attacks on the Twin Towers – in a fascinating and uninterrupted vortex of images and sounds whose narration is delivered exclusively via voice-over, including the interviews conducted more recently by Lovelace and Southern. Based on the homonymous book by musical journalist Lizzie Goodman, who also wrote the film’s screenplay, the movie actually avoids the talking heads format and doesn’t even show its protagonists as they are today (they’re all still in the business, as it happens), further enhancing the “time capsule” effect created by the documentary. Only twenty or so years have passed, but it seems like a century ago.

Fans of this kind of music and of these bands in particular will have enough to sink their teeth into, because the authors intertwine the various paths of these artists, creating a precise narrative line for each of these groups and emphasising their singularity. For everyone else, it’s a portrait revealing a fascination for a world which was just a whisper away from change, so near but yet so far from today’s world.

Meet Me In the Bathroom is produced by Pulse Films.

(Translated from Italian)