Sundance 2022 Interview: MEET ME IN THE BATHROOM Directors Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace and Author Lizzy Goodman Discuss
Considering the myriad of exciting topics and subtopics packed within the running time of Meet Me In The Bathroom -- Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace’s impressively dense adaptation of Lizzy Goodman’s loaded oral history of the New York music scene to emerge from the new millennium -- I found the film pretty challenging to review. (It didn't help that I also had covid.)
Suffice it to say, as artifacts go, in this strange new age of hyper-documented reality, so much of which is written on the walls of this film, I think it's a pretty important chapter of the American rockumentary canon, if not a century-culminating bookend.
It seems that eras are only truly defined in retrospect and, now that we’re finally able to unpack and evaluate this period with the necessary distance, I can think of no greater starting point, both for those present, but particularly for future generations, than this almost National Geographic-minded look into a fascinating moment in time with a kickass soundtrack; one that, while only relatively few were fortunate to experience firsthand, millions upon millions will continue to enjoy for the rest of life on Earth.
And as it goes for just about every explosive music scene to have any historic impact, in the center of all that legend and myth that time only further cements, whether it was The Beatles, The Stooges, The Go Gos, or The Strokes, lies a handful of (just) kids having a good time and living like there’s no tomorrow, with no inkling of how prominently they’d figure into it. There’s something incredibly beautiful about that thought and, in many ways, it too is one of the abundance of holy subjects this film manages to contain.
I had the great privilege of navigating this monster subject with Meet Me In The Bathroom’s storytellers: author Lizzy Goodman, and filmmakers Dylan Southern & Will Lovelace, upon the eve of its Sundance world premiere. Enjoy our Zoom chat below.
