Instrument

When you think of a documentary, you think of talking head interviews. Narration to expedite getting from A to B. A straight-line, or at least an obvious narrative thread to tie everything together. These are your standard building blocks for documentaries since time out of mind. There are plenty of great ones out there that use these elements, and there are plenty of bad ones out there that do it too. The formula does tend to make them all feel a bit samey, though, especially with band documentaries. You get whatever band members can/will participate, some satellite personalities, maybe a few famous fans, talk about the ups and downs, why they're so important, wrap it up with a where-are-they-now, and you're done. It's simple and effective. It's also lazy and obvious. So of course the one band to break it would be Fugazi, a band defined as much by their eagerness to put the rule book for having a successful career in music through a paper shredder as it is by their music. This is the band with hardcore and punk roots that would stop concerts and demand moshpits stop or they'd throw out the perpetrators. This is the band that refused to do interviews with any media outlet that advertised alcohol or cigarettes. This is the band that played in pizza parlors and teen rec centers, and kept ticket prices at or below a tenner. Of course they'd look at the standard documentary and bin it. It's the Fugazi way. The result is that Instrument is somehow both more intrusive and more at arm's length than a standard documentary. With footage shot over the course of 11 years, Instrument is nothing but concert footage, backstage stuff, clips from the few interviews they've done (an 8th grade A/V club!), and footage filmed at home or in the studio. If there's a moment where they sit down, it's because that happened in their lives, at a dinner table or that couch in the junior high. Everything captured in Instrument is raw and real and unrehearsed. There's no attempt to string together the the footage into a front to back career retrospective either; it starts around their first show, sure, but then it might jump to a concert in 1993, and then back to a rehearsal in 1990, and then in the studio in 1994, and then their tenth anniversary concert. Just as Fugazi's music could challenge the very fabric of what makes a song, so does their movie. It refuses to conform. It is a documentary in the most literal sense of the idea. It is a moving document, an unbiased, unpolished, and unapologetic relaying of the events that transpired, and that's all it is. Fugazi are as steadfast in their ideals as they are humble. They have no need to convince you of their quality or to flash their bonafides. You get them or you don't, and Instrument is not here to convince you of anything other than that they were a band who approached music like nobody else before, and possibly no one since. But as much as Instrument is a window inside their lives and their career, that shapelessness and refusal to play to the common beat comes at a price. Without a straight line, Instrument is just watching two hours of guys doing stuff. Other than a mention of Guy Picciotto being in the audience at their first show, that's as close as you get to a band origin story. There's no insight into the challenges of eschewing bars and normal venues for performing at benefits and political rallies and non-traditional venues. There are no secrets exposed about the making of albums and the deeper meaning behind lyrics. That last point actually becomes a bit of a moment when they're asked a question about what their lyrics mean, and they get a bit defensive, saying the lyrics are self-explanatory. So, is "Birthday Pony" about a horse someone got for their birthday? Anyway, Instrument is a peek inside the band, but it is a carefully curated one, and one that lets the audience see the activities and life of the band, but not the men in it. That leaves Instrument in a weird place, even for a musical documentary. You could not show to someone who has never heard of Fugazi and turn them into a fan, even with its multiple full-length performances, solely because the movie does little to invite the viewer in, or provide reason to stay when they do. Conversely, only the most die-hard Fugazi fan could watch this and feel like they've gotten something they didn't already get from their lyrics or Wikipedia entries. I commend Fugazi for doing a documentary their way. They had the cred to do it, and I expected nothing less than a movie almost allergic to conventional documentary forms. But outside of doing it for the sake of doing it, I struggle to think of a reason why to do it, let alone why anyone should watch it.