Beastie Boys Story

With 94% on the Tomatometer and a corresponding 92% audience score, music documentary Beastie Boys Story is clearly resonating with critics and fans alike. The Spike Jonze-directed live documentary (who directed many of the Beasties’ music videos) happens to arrive via streaming at a time when mass live music concerts are all but a faded memory; it feels particularly timely to drop a retrospective of one of the most bombastic acts to have come out of the hip hop world in the past few decades. 

After a blink-and-you’ll-miss it faux-VHS tape transition, we see the three original band members in what looks to be around the early nineties, with now-deceased member Adam Yauch rapping an appropriately repurposed introduction: “Now here’s a little story that I got to tell about three bad brothers that you know so well.” Vitally, apart from the initial few seconds of attention-grabbing, hype-inducing sound, Yauch’s voice is the first cognisant sound we hear in this trailer, and this tendency to defer to or otherwise honour the Beastie Boy who is no longer with us will prove to be a centring theme in this trailer. 

From 0:16 to 0:32 we hear an aural montage of various people simply saying “the Beastie Boys”—as part of a corresponding mashup of various segments documenting the Boys’ rise to fame, it works well enough. It also becomes clear that part of the framing, as a live documentary, is to focus the surviving members of the band’s live commentary and unfiltered reactions and insights; the footage was captured was part of an original live event, which seems both very appropriate and surprisingly rare as a format for a live band’s career retrospective.

This build-up in the first half segues neatly to a complementary look at the latter half of the band’s career. “I Don’t Know”, a cut from 1998’s Hello Nasty, leads the latter half of the trailer, from 1:33 on. A modal interchange in the chord progression, with its chromatically descending line, emotionally dovetails with the trailer’s turn to focus on Adam Yauch, who passed away in 2012 from parotid cancer. While the track is appropriately introspective, paired with various historical footage from Yauch’s life and career, it’s an usual track from the Beastie Boys to say the least; it was only performed live once, in a 2001 concert in Germany. Atop this music and footage is Yauch’s bandmates, Michael “Mike D” Diamond and Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz, again providing talking-heads-style commentary. 

At the end of the monologue, they ask rhetorically, “Who gets to work every day with their two best friends?”—and, as if in response, Adam Yauch sings “I don’t know” as the music enters the forefront again. It’s a clever and subtle editing flourish that reaffirms the connection that the trio will always share through their record output.

The chorus of the song gently rides out the remainder of the trailer, allowing the montage of music videos, concerts, and various other footage to hold centre focus. The bossa nova style of the song comes off as bittersweet, especially, again, for a group best known for fighting for their right to party. Still, that subversion of expectations is exactly why the choice of music on offer here is particularly impactful. Still, a question remains as to whether this deep cut would compel the audioviewer to screen the documentary, or whether the track is so esoteric as to give off the wrong impression.

Beastie Boys Story is available on Apple TV+. 

— Curtis Perry