Meet Me In The Bathroom

Loosely based on the oral history by journalist Lizzy Goodman, Meet Me In The Bathroom attempts to chronicle indie rock at the turn of the century when bands like The Strokes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs gave New York a new lease of life. Goodman’s book is an epic tome but Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace pare it down to a few, easily digestible strands, also spending time on TV On The Radio, Interpol and LCD Soundsystem, whose mouthpiece James Murphy proves the biggest personality here, a raconteur in the classic New York scenester mould.

As with Goodman’s book, the New York setting is inseparable from these artists. An early sequence flashes on the city’s earlier luminaries, from Lou Reed to Wu Tang Clan’s ODB (an unexpected inclusion here, but at least alluding to parallel scenes in the city), a history these bands were overtly familiar with. But where Goodman offered a pithy, rollicking, drug-filled, unashamedly frothy account of the period, remembered by artists, managers, label staff, journalists and bouncers, the film adopts a quieter mode, eschewing talking heads like so many current docs and relying entirely on archive video and narration.

The result ends up feeling smaller and more insular, dipping from band to band rather than finding a common thread or a unified purpose, ambition or even much connection between them. Limiting its soundbites to artists, there’s little sense of a bigger picture, or outside voices to offer alternate perspectives (Karen O and Julian Casablancas might have been responsible for some of the scene’s greatest songs but aren’t that memorable as interviewees). It adds up to a schematically told story that might have benefitted from being broken up into individual episodes. Southern and Lovelace stick to a fashionable, tastefully minimalist aesthetic, but they play it too safe – this is a film that deserves maximalist energy. Its worst offence might be that for a film about bands whose buzz started from their live shows, there’s a lack of memorable performances.

For music fans comparing the online networks of today to IRL scenes from decades past with, Meet Me In The Bathroom might be intriguing, but it falls back too trustily on tried and tested rock-doc arcs. We learn that the Strokes struggled with drugs and that Karen O struggled to maintain a line between her on-and off-stage personalities. Old debates around class and questions of rock authenticity which sprung up around The Strokes are revisited, but there’s little new light shed on the matter. Maybe that’s a result of relying so heavily on archive footage, but it barely advances the discussion from where it was two decades ago. Which is the biggest problem with Meet Me In The Bathroom. Feeling strangely perfunctory, there’s little new on show.