Editor’s Note: Vanyaland Film Editor Nick Johnston is here in Boston, but his heart is in Utah as he remotely covers the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. This year’s Sundance is a virtual edition, but that’s not stopping the film premieres from flowing. Check out our official Sundance preview, scan through all our Sundance 2022 reviews as they are published, and check out our full archives of past festivals.
If there’s any documentary at the fest this year that will make even the youngest millennial viewer feel approximately one thousand years old, it’s Meet Me in the Bathroom, Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern’s doc-adaptation of Lizzy Goodman’s book about the major players in New York City indie in the years just before and immediately after 9/11. All of the usual suspects are here: The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, LCD Soundsystem (which was the subject of Lovelace and Southern’s last film, Shut Up and Play the Hits), TV on the Radio, and there’s even a slight detour into anti-folk that kicks off the film, which might mark the first time that the Moldy Peaches have been featured in a film since Juno. If any former grocery-store shoplifter of Spin turned middle manager at a regional company is sitting at their desk reading this and suddenly feel the chill of the reaper’s scythe on the hairs of their neck, well, I empathize deeply with you. This is, perhaps, the future that awaits all of us in the end, and I’m sure Gen Z will feel the exact same way when an assemblage of Soundcloud rappers gather together in 20 years to eulogize The Last Good Time, much as we’re doing here.
Thankfully, Lovelace and Southern are smart enough not to burden their film with too much of the present, and they’ve assembled their film entirely from archival footage, presumably to continue to distance themselves from talking heads and any forthcoming accusations that the era was derivative of the scene that emerged in NYC in the ’70s. Yes, that was a pun, but there’s some level of truth to it: Adam Green begins the film discussing how it seemed that New York had lost its luster, that the freaks and boundary-pushers who made the city what it was seemed to abandon it in favor of places with cheaper rent. But, like so many others, they found their home in the urban forest, and others took root alongside them. Karen O began her career on the same stage, writing lovely little songs on her guitar before taking off as the lead singer of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, encountering the same shitstorm that comes for every woman leading a rock band, especially in the crass Bush era, where women were eviscerated even by ostensibly progressive media.
It’s amazing to be reminded of just how central to this movement New York was, not through text or narration or the typical cliches, but through actual footage of the figures in those scenes existing on their streets outside of the stages. There are shots of Paul Banks walking around on 9/11, picking up sheets of paper in the ash-strewn streets of the Lower East Side, lost and confused as much as anyone else in those days; of O and her Yeah Yeah Yeahs collaborators sitting on stoops with brown-bagged liquor; of The Strokes getting positively fucked up in the old MTV studio during a Courtney Love takeover event (god, remember those days?). They were drawn in by the scenes and the culture and the possibilities that it represented and then they became the draw, and the film falters heavily in its final moments by mourning that New York, whose decline and fall was hastened by their own successes. The exodus to Williamsburg and the subsequent rise in rents and targeted development happened as a response to their influence, though it was a reversion to the mean that has always been true regardless of anyone’s intentions. But as a survey of a cultural moment, Meet Me in the Bathroom works well enough as a primer on the era for future generations, even if it may devastate balding hipsters in the process.