Mark Reviews Movies: BEASTIE BOYS STORY

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 23, 2020

The elephant in this particular room—the auditorium of Brooklyn's Kings Theatre—is that there are only two members of the Beastie Boys telling the band's story. That fact is addressed early in Beastie Boys Story, a combination of documentary and filmed live show, and it lingers just on the periphery of the stage, in the gap between the two performers on stage, and on the giant screen behind them whenever their late friend/bandmate appears there.

The best thing about this movie, unfortunately, is not the band's story, the movie's format (which is a nothing beyond a recorded performance, with the video and photographs that the audience sees taking over the entire screen for the movie's audience), or the notion of a live performance (Indeed, the audience in the theater is the most unnecessarily distracting part of the movie). It is, though, the obvious depth of friendship between the two men on stage.

Adam Horovitz, aka "Ad-Rock," and Michael Diamond, aka "Mike D," had been friends for almost 40 years at the time the live show was filmed on two nights in April of 2019. Their rapport, as one might imagine, is basically intrinsic at this point.

They work off a teleprompter, from a script by the two and director Spike Jonze (who has known the band since he directed the clever music video for their rousing hit "Sabotage" in 1994), and it's obvious that they do. There's even a moment when Jonze, who directed both the movie and the stage show and sits up in the booth in front of the stage, has to interrupt Diamond because of a prompter error. Without missing a beat, Diamond and Horovitz do a little, disbelieving bit about the flub and feign ignorance about the teleprompter's presence. They're so natural that we wonder if it was a real mistake or just a gag for the show.

The absent member of the group is Adam Yauch, aka "MCA," who died in 2012 of cancer. The Beastie Boys, whose music combined hip hop and rock and rap (Does that really need to be clarified?), ended with Yauch's death, and Horovitz and Diamond have accepted that sad reality as much as anyone suffering such a loss can. Now, they get tell the band's story and honor their friend.

He was the kind of friend, they say, who was more than a drinking buddy, a bandmate, or the kind of pal who would keep a spot on his couch if you ever needed it. He motivated them to do what they wanted and to do it better than they might have believed possible. Horovtiz, reading an excerpt from a book the two wrote about the band's history, has to stop describing Yauch at one point to keep back the tears, and he just reaches out to touch Diamond's arm. Such moments of vulnerability and connection can't be planned for or staged.

It's far too tempting to keep describing these moments of humor and camaraderie between the remaining Beastie Boys, because they come through so strongly and so naturally amidst a movie that's just a recorded stage show that just goes through the biographical motions of band's history. They met in the late 1970s and early '80s through their love of punk music. The band originally was a collection of friends, founded by Diamond, with Yauch and Horovitz joining over the following years. Eventually, they became fans of rap and hip hop before the genres became mainstream and, almost as a joke, started to incorporate rhymes into the songs.

The joke, though, became serious fast. By 1985, they were opening for Madonna (An equally amused and ashamed Horovitz explains how they decided to be "bad boys" during the tour, cursing out audiences filled with pre-teen girls) and releasing the album License to Ill, which became an immediate hit.

There's nothing unique about this story, which is filled with the kind of successes and failures, betrayals and strengthened bonds, and excess and inevitable downsizing that are part of any tale of the music industry. The major distinctions for the Beastie Boys, perhaps, are that they remained a closely knit group for 30 years, save for a few months when they were separated after getting sick of playing for the kinds of people they were mocking with their music, and that they quickly realized they became the joke from which they thought they held an ironic distance.

Horovitz apologizes for the song "Girls," which he knows was a gag but now realizes wasn't a funny one. They recall how Yauch included a rhyme in one of their songs about the need for casual or aggressive disrespect of women to stop. As for those older songs that did just that, Horovitz remembers how Yauch once told an interviewer, "I'd rather be a hypocrite than the same person forever." In that moment, like the two men on stage, we realize how much Yauch's presence is missed.

Horovitz, whose comedic chops are apparent throughout, and Diamond, who's a bit stilted but still quite engaging, do return to Yauch's absence for a sincere, melancholy finale to Beastie Boys Story. The rest of the movie/show is a straightforward telling of the Beastie Boys' history with only flashes of the humor we expect from these guys and Jonze—and none of the innovation we expect from the latter.

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