Long Strange Trip

Over the course of a 30-year career, the Grateful Dead carved out a place in American rock history in a way few bands have equalled. Like them or not - and they still have hordes of loyal fans - you can't ignore their impact, not just on music but on wider culture. Amir Bar-Lev's film is one of the strongest documentaries of the past year and tells their story in incredible detail. It incorporates an impressive variety of archive footage as well as new interview material with former band members and those close to them, journalists who covered their work and music industry professionals. There is, as one might expect, an extensive focus on the life of charismatic frontman Jerry Garcia, but Bar-Lev approaches the band as an organic whole and there's plenty of room for other people's stories.

You don't need to be a fan of the Dead to find this documentary highly enjoyable, and even lifelong fans are likely to discover new things when watching it. Appropriately for a band whose songs meandered as much as their career, it's nearly four hours long, but it never feels padded or drawn out and one comes away with the feeling that it would have been impossible to do justice to the subject in a shorter film. Like the best of the group's extended jams, it moves from one theme to another in a manner which, whilst engaging, seems at first to be random, then draws them together into an affecting whole.

The story of the band is, inevitably, intertwined with the history of psychedelic drugs, US youth culture, late Twentieth century philosophy and, latterly, heroin. Early on, we hear how the band resisted getting their picture taken because, like so many before and since, they thought their music should speak for itself - and how a naive photographer sent out to capture them got more than he bargained for when he accepted a drink. There's a sense of excitement in discovery that recalls past ages of geographical exploration, a desire to find new ways of thinking that went much further than simply the creation of music but that may have persuaded certain group members to try experiences they had less ability to come back from.

In and around this story we learn about the relationships within the band, its haphazard structure (including one member's story of turning up and saying he'd like to give it a try with an instrument he'd never played before, and summarily being taken along as part of the tour), and the near impossibility of defining in any sensible way who was and wasn't part of it. The film looks at the fan movement that ultimately overwhelmed the kind of live experiences the band had wanted to create, and the pressures that came from trying to please so many people.

Although the film is never sentimental, it would be difficult to watch it without warming to its subject. That underlying sense of honesty and openness to experience has something heroic about it and makes this more than just another story about a group of people having fun together on stage, even if that's what they might have liked it to be. It's more than a typical daydream.