This amateurish (not in a good way) docu still gathers an impressive mix of odd and famous rock writers, many from Creem magazine and other "underground" mags from the 60s and 70s, but has distracted and historically incoherent production values. It is a bad sign that a documentary about music writers who all had fierce criteria for "authentic" rocknroll has a chronic background of generic, instrumental guitar rock of the sort that high school football videos or a corporate "hold please" might have used in 1988. Somehow the director/ editor (this seems to be the academic exercise of one person with novice computer skills) gives the impression of trying to learn rock history on the job, as though they got this commission from another planet, because they miss any opportunity for narrative connections or thematic momentum. The result is mind-bogglingly haphazard, with dozens of jarringly inapt transitions and baffling combinations of image (a picture the band Television, the most ornate and baroque the 70s New York bands) and claim ("things were getting back to teen-aged simplicity!"). A promising narrative thread will be introduced by one of the rock writers and in the next moment another writer, obviously in the middle of a wildly different conversation, relates a completely new topic. Seconds later, a jump cut to a different writer saying something about having drinks with the Faces backstage in 1973. Cut! And "we'd play 'Metal Machine Music' as crowd noise to our office trashcan paper-wad basketball." Cut! Images of Creem covers from 1982 with the insufferable "please hold" generic instrumental rock chugging in the background behind all of this, as indifferent to history as a coma victim, oblivious to mood or nuance, the things that made Lester Bangs get up and do speed to greet the day. What do we learn of him? And "Lester Bangs was oft-photographed and a real star himself!" This platitude is repeated a half-dozen times without the substance of his work, or any other writer's soul or style, coming into focus. Most of these writers were, intermittently at least, witty, terse, and clever *writers*--nothing of this comes through--rather, they were fans who got satellite status around stars--an evanescent, unimportant, and often rejected part of the "writing about music" job. The sad part is some of these critics, gamely set up for interviews (the logistics of this were impressive--the film's budget must have been 85% travel expenses?), are now literally grey-bearded and in one bewildering case, toothless (!), and may not be around for long, so the opportunity to interview them was often squandered in this collage of fragments that could be bested by someone with modest interest in the history of rock writing surfing Youtube improvisationally for an hour. A mystifyingly wasted opportunity.