It’s a shame that, after nearly 40 years of writing about rock, Cameron Crowe is receptive to the clichés of the genre. His documentary “Pearl Jam Twenty” mainly treats us to Eddie Vedder and Co. saluting one another’s musicianship, expressing alienation from fame and telling us how cool Neil Young is.
Crowe’s doc, which is strictly for fans, does feature some great concert footage, remarkable backstage stuff such as Vedder’s dance with Cobain at a 1992 MTV show and interesting visual touches, though most of these are also familiar from MTV.
But we learn zero about the women in these men’s lives. When Vedder decides to start traveling apart from the rest of the band, we hear nothing from him on the subject. Nor do we learn why the band chose its name. Even the story of how Vedder grew up with a man he believed to be his father, then discovered who his real father was around the time of his death, is given with almost no detail.
As a general rule, what celebrities want to talk about tends to be uninteresting or trite. It fell to Crowe, who has been friendly with the band from the beginning and featured them in his 1992 film “Singles,” to draw them out and make them talk about something other than the terrors of being on the cover of Time magazine. And though Crowe has written many comedies, he is also blind to the absurd side of rock egos. In a better film, Crowe would have played journalist instead of fan boy.