TIFF 2011: PEARL JAM TWENTY Review

While I would never claim to have been a truly devoted fan of Pearl Jam, their early work, in particular their debut album "Ten" and the single "Alive" were pillars of musical splendour upon which my teenage years were constructed. I remember a good friend of mine at school had the 7" single of "Alive" and I would make any excuse to borrow it time and again, playing it on a persistent loop until I knew every vocal and guitar stroke. Not that I was any kind of musician, just an enthusiastic air guitarist.

If I'm completely honest, as the years went on I found myself siding more with the Nirvana than the Pearl Jam camp, not because I was concerned over accusations that were flying around during the early nineties, which labeled Kurt Cobain as the Second Coming and Vedder & Co as corporate sell-outs, Nirvana just seemed the more appealing in the eyes of a simple-minded teen more besotted with Cinema than Music. The iconography was more prominent and I was easily swayed. As the years passed my attentions moved even further away from the Seattle grunge scene, and it is only now, twenty years later that director Cameron Crowe has fueled a fire within me I never even knew was burning. What was at-best only ever a casual, almost flippant support of Pearl Jam has become a ravenous hunger to revisit that soundtrack to my most awkward of years and painstakingly explore the band's back catalogue from its overzealous arrival in 1991 to the present day. Such is the power of Crowe's PEARL JAM TWENTY, and, one must concede, the band's music. 

Crowe made tracks for Seattle in the mid-eighties, where as a budding young music journalist he came upon a live scene unlike that in any other major city in the country. Here the bands were collaborative and supportive of each other, rather than fighting tooth and nail to claw their way over each other to get to the top. Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament were little more than enthusiastic kids back then, but with talent to spare and a band called Mother Love Bone that was quickly making a name for itself. The tragic death of their charismatic frontman Andy Wood forced the guys to take a step back and it was the intervention of Wood's housemate, Soundgarden's Chris Cornell, that got them playing again, working with Mike McCready and a shy, soft spoken young vocalist named Eddie Vedder. Within a year, drummer Dave Krusen had joined and Pearl Jam was formed.

Using a staggering array of footage, including band interviews, performances and backstage antics, Crowe is able to vividly chart every step of the band's evolution in the past two decades. We see Vedder's transformation from insular young poet to the headbanging showman who would scale lighting rigs during gigs before throwing himself into the crowd, or the band's Spinal Tap-like misfortune with drummers who couldn't commit to life on the road in a famous rock band. 

We learn through numerous candid interviews with each member of the band how the creative balance of power within Pearl Jam changed from Stone to Eddie, and how they all remained committed to their craft while so many of their contemporaries fell by the wayside. We witness their struggles with fame and the industry - from their seminal MTV Unplugged performance to the disastrous SINGLES release party that could have ended their career. The film takes the time to detail the band's long-running battle against Ticketmaster, as well as the dark days that followed the tragedy at Roskilde in 2000 that saw 9 members of the audience crushed to death in front of them.

Crowe's gushing yet intoxicating portrait tells you everything you could possibly want to know about Pearl Jam while never feeling like anything more educational than a thrilling fly-on-the-wall concert film. Audience members who have seen the band play live will be aching to return to that sweaty club or rain-drenched arena while those who have never had the chance to attend a Pearl Jam gig will no doubt be more determined than ever to track them down. 

For a band whose outspoken attitude towards the industry has ruffled plenty of feathers over the years, the band members come across as open, honest and surprisingly humble. You will believe that these guys, now well into their 40s, can take or leave their success at any time, provided they still have their instruments and are allowed the opportunity to play. Not that you would want them to quit. PEARL JAM TWENTY is a film you simply don't want to end, a film that has cherry picked the finest live renditions of so many excellent songs and edited them together into a sublime celebration of rock music done right. PEARL JAM TWENTY treats you to many of their very best performances (and even a few of their worst just for good measure). If Pearl Jam were never to play another note Crowe's film would serve as the perfect eulogy to a band that seems more important than ever. More than anything, however, PEARL JAM TWENTY will send you racing home to crank "Ten" up as loud as it will go and thrash the night away, wishing you were young again and still had hair down to your nipples.