The entire point of Meet Me in the Bathroom is to mythologize a particular wave of indie rock that swept the music scene in the early 2000s. Directors Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace’s documentary follows a few of these bands and their lead singers through the initial stages of fame, somehow without making a single point of real substance beyond that the music was pretty great. By the time we reach the end, we have been treated to a majority of the music video for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Maps,” a defining track in this era of rock, both for the wider scene and for the band’s frontwoman, Karen O. Those of us whose taste was partly defined by this subgenre of rock music already know it was a formative time. This film is a few steps too far in recognizing that.
The film, then, adds up to nothing more than a trip down memory lane, and the only thing of real worth here is the astonishing access that has been granted to the directors via what must have been hundreds or, perhaps, thousands of hours of footage. To the filmmakers’ credit, not a single second of the documentary is devoted to a talking-head approach. Instead, we see the footage and hear the voices of the interview subjects, a lot of whom talk about where they were, physically and emotionally, when they heard certain bands and/or created their own around the turn of the century. Following the ludicrous tech-nightmare-in-waiting that was Y2K, these groups were all in the embryonic stages of their development, and we are treated to a taste of their early success.
A great deal of that footage is devoted to Julian Casablancas, the enigmatic lead singer of the Strokes, who himself is not one of the interview subjects we hear commenting on all of this. It seems like a strangely limiting choice or conundrum (depending on the circumstances that led to going ahead with this project anyway), but all we get, in any case, are some observations about the writing and production of the band’s great 2001 album Is This It and its literal placement on a timeline that eerily aligned with the attacks on September 11th in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C. Those acts of terrorism lit a fire beneath this music movement, but that exact observation is as deep as it gets for the movie.
Elsewhere, we get a fair amount of decent footage following the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol and its lead vocalist Paul Banks, and LCD Soundsystem (the brainchild of James Murphy), all of whom have some insights into the early stages of their music moment. Other groups, such as Liars, the Moldy Peaches, the Rapture and TV on the Radio are not given enough time to make more than a few observations about themselves and their place in the early 2000s. Perhaps now would be a good time to mention that Southern and Lovelace are adapting a book by Lizzy Goodman – a book that must dig much deeper than the surface-level observations found here. There is some obvious value in the music featured in Meet Me in the Bathroom, but the film around that music is safe, pretty bland and a missed opportunity to explore what it all really meant to the fans of these groups.
Photo courtesy of Utopia
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