Beastie Boys Story
BEASTIE BOYS STORY -APPLE TV +
In early 2019, Michael “Mike D” Diamond and Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz arrived at Brooklyn’s fully packed King’s Theater for their first Beastie Boys live show in a decade. However, they weren’t there to perform their hits or to reform the band but, instead, they were there to tell their story in the most intimate way possible. With the visual aid of archival images and clips of the band in their heyday, the surviving members of Beastie Boys reflectively took a trip down memory lane. They fondly looked back at their tumultuous time growing up as well as the subsequent highs and lows of their career as a group of musical misfits in New York City.
The band’s friend and longtime collaborator, Spike Jonze adapts this stage show into a two-hour-long storytelling session full of passion, light-hearted humour and nostalgia. This is all combined with countless intimate details as Mike D and Ad-Rock find themselves reconciling with the past and the absence of their best friend, Adam “MCA” Yauch (who died of cancer in 2012). At the start of the show, the audience can hear Mike D and Ad-Rock say, “we are the Beastie Boys from New York City”. It does not take long until the absence of a third member is felt for one to see that this is not entirely true since one member is missing. Ever since their disbandment in 2012 – following the death of Yauch – it has come as a real shock, or a somewhat surreal feeling, for many hardcore fans of the band to see just two members of the Beastie Boys up on stage again without the third.
Watching the documentary unfold beat by beat is no more and no less than the experience of spectating a live performance in the form of a Ted Talk. As simple as that, Mike D and Ad-Rock pace around the stage with their formidably infectious energy and chemistry. The bound about in front of a giant PowerPoint on screen, holding mics in their hand, reminiscing and walking the audience through the fundamentals: from how the trio stumbled into the hip-hop scene to how they gradually found their voice. How their idiosyncratic creative processes worked, the friends they made and lost along the way, and their precipitous fall and rise to fame. That being said, the stagey Ted Talk quality of the film can also be deemed as one of its major flaws. considering the film is helmed by a director of such idiosyncratic calibre like Spike Jonze, it is only normal for viewers to expect more about a band well known for their eccentric styles and explosive charisma.
Beastie Boys Story serves as a wistful memory of the simplicities and organic dialect of friendship. Sometimes feeling less a cinematic venture than the directors previous work but Jonze'‘ ode stands as a wholesome bond with some friends you never knew you had.