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I would like to talk to the person who told you that.
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MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW
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A few things shine through:
(1) This is a vanity project for Jakob Dylan, in that he wants to record songs from this era, so the movie promotes that collection of music. Rather than a broad sample of who and what Laurel Canyon was about, we only feature the songs and artists he's covering. I kind of like Jakob's sound but that's what the deal is.
(2) Jakob Dylan is friends with a lot of singers who — and I don't want to be ungenerous here — did not impress me as singers. Young Fiona Apple sure was a powerhouse, but these days she has a jarring tremolo that makes your eyebrows go up. Regina Spektor still has her power but punts on melody and hunches and sways in distractingly inappropriate stage-theatricality. Jade Castrinos seemed to think it was peachy keen to wear sixties looks and belt out Cass Elliott parts, but her pitch didn't match her enthusiasm. Cat Power growls like Bonnie Raitt when she was in the bag. Maybe all these folks make great records (Beck certainly has), but they (Beck included) don't have a surfeit of skills coming through live in person. But Beck's singing felt honest, at least. Norah Jones isn't a favorite of mine, but she's a pro and it came through.
When I'm listing Jakob Dylan (and his very narrow range) as one of the better singers here, that's saying something. And him trying to sing "In My Room"? Bad idea.
(3) They really avoid the dark side of Laurel Canyon. Where are The Doors? Where is Phil Spector? Where is Charles Fucking Manson? How do you tell a story that's not only about Laurel Canyon in the mid-to-late sixties, but largely focus on The Beach Boys and The Mamas & The Papas, but leave out Manson? No mention of Roman Polanski or Sharon Tate, either.
(4) Michelle Phillips is a bad person. Her Lori Partridge hair and cute overbite may have looked adorable, but she was a Machiavellian backstabber, and considering she has to be one of the four or five least qualified people in The Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame, she gets a lot of screen time here to justify her bullshit. That would be alright, if they immediately cut from her to John Sebastian or somebody saying, "Michelle Phillips is a really bad person," but they didn't.
(5) Steven Stills seems like he's recovering from a stroke, but I get the idea that he's simply drunk. And not like having-a good-time drunk. More like I'm-so-saturated-on-a-daily-basis-it-only-takes-a-few-sips-to-get-me-drunk drunk. That's just sad but impossible to ignore. If I paid money to see him in this condition, I'd be embarrassed. Stills is (or at least was, the last time I heard him) a GREAT guitarist, but he fumbles around on his acoustic in the interview in his house like he's not sure what he wants to do with it, and his fingers are turning into thumbs. Later, he's invited into the studio to lay down an electric solo, and while he seems more lucid and solid in his playing, he's playing his solo UNDERNEATH Eric Clapton's, and as if that wasn't perfectly clear, the sound board behind him explicitly shows Clapton's level at around an 8 while Stills is at a two. And I kid you not here, when he's finished, you can explicitly see Jakob take the guitar back and point to him where the door is. Good God.
(6) Impossibly, Joni Mitchell's name is not mentioned once. Judy Collins and Jakob's dad only come up once each in passing. But Joni was the queen of Laurel Canyon, and if you go looking for photos of these musicians in that era, they're all at Joni's house. They seem to claim they were limiting their scope to 1965-1967, and Joni arrives in 1968, but cutting from the story Joni, Manson, the wave of cocaine that would snow down on the valley, and for that matter, Crosby introducing heroin to half of LA, really bowdlerizes things. They don't really want to talk about the seventies Canyon generation, but they allow Tom Petty and Jackson Browne to speak liberally about the era that preceded them.
(7) They attempt to take this (typically) boring French Nu Wave film as their inspiration, and as a metaphor for the era, it just points out how sickly doomed the whole idealistic thing is.
(8) Crosby, Stills, and Nash are interviewed at length, but separately. Crosby is the most interesting, because he admits he was an asshole, but he seems to think he was in the right when The Byrds didn't want to record his song about a menage-a-trois. Neil only appears at the very end, as a ghostly figure filmed in the recording studio, through the glass from the control room. His guitar and his sound are totally him, but it's weird how apart from laying down this one track he distanced himself from the project. It's like at the end, somebody realized they were unable to get any footage of Neil so they shot him through a keyhole and showed it during the closing credits.
(9) This is some of the last interview footage of Petty you'll find, and he says some illuminating stuff, but he also says some stupid stuff.
There's a sub-theme running through it that would have made for a better angle for the whole story, and that's the Rickenbacker 12-string. John Lennon had a 3/4-size Rickenbacker, and when the Beats were in California, a representative of the company tried to give John their brand new second-ever-made 12-string. But John, Paul and Ringo had gone out that night while George stayed in the hotel sick, so George got the guitar, and the sound of him playing it just woke up Roger McGuinn and John Sebastian — like it made the crossover of folk and rock possible. It's impossible to listen to TP & the Heartbreakers do "The Waiting," for instance, now and not think of it as as song born out of 1966 in Laurel Canyon.
That would have been a better movie. Instead we get a combo of Jakob ego-stroking a bunch of old hippies, and rounding up his friends to put on a show that seems to want to celebrate the great records by demonstrating how bad some of these songs might otherwise sound. It gives me no pleasure to write that, and the backing band and sound were mostly solid or better. I also might have wanted to hear from the kids who grew up in all this madness: Sonny & Cher's kids and the Wilson Phillips girls. They might have a more measured sense of what the culture of this crowd cost everybody. Jesus, let's hear about the wreckage from MacKenzie.
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