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This film is by Alison Ellwood, who set the standard for band docs with the very-rewatchable History of the Eagles. So it's interesting to find parallels with that film, and it's always going to be there when it's another story of LA scenesters making it big and fueling their wild ride with massive amounts of coke. But there are other story arc similarities — like the too-often-forgotten pre-breakup period where Jane had quit the band (the Go-Go's without Jane? unpossible!) mirroring the Don Felder tale in that it was precipitated by her hopig to sing lead on a song and getting rejected. Unequal shares of the $$ get under everybody's skin, and the manager who believed in them from the get-go and brought them to the top gets tossed over the side as soon as they get there.
Guitarist Charlotte Caffey, who seemed to be ahead of them as a musician and songwriter, always appeared to be more uptown than the rest of them with her hair and fashion sense. (In fact, she seemed more like a Bangle and actually later toured with the Bangs during a Vicki Peterson maternity break.) But turns out that she was anything but uptown, nursing a nasty heroin habit almost from the band's inception.
The real star of the whole thing is drummer Gina Schock, who has been through health scares and hard times, and just sardonically laughs at all the bullshit with more candor and frankness than the rest of them put together, all of whom are more interested in their own stories than the band's. Her flat-voice allows you to look at the band from her seat on the drum riser in the back, hysterically detached, if only in retrospect.
At the end, the narrative blindingly jumps from 1985 to 2000, and then 2000 to the present, skipping over a bunch of attempted relaunchings and the not-terrible God Bless the Go-Go's comeback album from 2001. The problem, as these these things tend to do, turns on the enterprise being authorized, and missing the documentarian's detachment (with most exceptions, again, being the Schock highlights), so the movie ends up (a) plugging the band's failed juke-box musical, (b) lobbying for the band to be inducted into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame, and (c) plugging the new single they just got together to do, which is ... meh ... but you'll hear it on a Sirius station or two if you listen real hard. Their relationships with groupies, cosmetic surgeries, solo careers, Kathy Valentine's lawsuit and grudge against the rest ... are all hard to spin graciously, so they simpy get whitewashed.
Strange to hear the narrative that they really upped their game as players before the first album, and that Stewart Copeland is a big booster of theirs (and one of their RnRHoF lobbyists.) My understanding had been that their playing only picked up after Copeland tutored them all during the massive Police Around the World Tour.
Anyhow, if they put more energy into getting something more out of their partnership rather than hiring a filmmaker to inflate their story, they might well be a worthy induction. Until then, yeah, they were the first all-female act to go to #1 both singing and and playing their instruments, and that's certainly not nothing, but now, they're scarcely more than a vehicle for Belinda Carlisle's terrifying cycles of plastic surgery. (She originally seemed to be trying to turn herself into Ann-Margret, but now she's more late-stage Priscilla Presley, and I don't feel good about typing that.)
There's an interesting subplot about a grudge with Jann Wenner. And that could certainly go a long way toward explaining why they haven't even been nominated for the Hall, but there have been a lot of bands on the outside looking in despite waves of fan support, and the ones who eventually broke through — think Rush and Cheap Trick — were the ones who kept plugging in, playing, touring, making albums, and not letting the world leave them behind.
Show me, you know?
And that show me has to go for Ellwood as well, who also came up short on her Laurel Canyon film. If you're ever going to match that Eagles movie, you have to try and do this from your own initiative, instead of going to work for your own subject.
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