Format: Streaming video from HBO Max on Fire!
Ask people who watch a lot of concert movies and you’ll hear over and over that the single best concert film in history is Stop Making Sense, the Jonathan Demme-helmed film of the Talking Heads tour at the end of 1983. Honestly, it’s not a huge shock to me that what is probably the second-best concert film in history is another David Byrne project, this time produced and directed by Spike Lee. David Byrne’s American Utopia captures the same sort of lightning in a bottle, showing a display of music, dance, and art from front to back, covering Byrne’s Broadway show of several years ago, and nothing more (with a few minor exceptions).
It is very much like Stop Making Sense. What was unique about Demme’s film, or at least very different from a lot of musical documentaries and films is that there was nothing behind the scenes. It was just the concert, one song leading into the next, the band and the instruments coming out one by one as the show progressed and screens drop down so that images could be projected on them. American Utopia is even more stripped down. This is literally just the show, filmed from start to finish. The genius of the show, and the genius of the film is that it doesn’t need to be anything more than this.
