It’s August 1999, and a young man dressed like Robin Hood and a young woman wearing pink bunny ears are grinning widely as they sing a little ditty about orange juice and botulism. A dude pogoes awkwardly in their midst onstage; afterward, a hat is passed around. The scene, featuring anti-folk oddballs Adam Green and Kimya Dawson of the Moldy Peaches, might not sound like the beginnings of any kind of revolution. But appearing early in the new documentary Meet Me in the Bathroom, the endearingly idiosyncratic performance hints at a creative freedom and communal spirit that would soon turn New York City’s Lower East Side and Williamsburg neighborhoods into the hot zone for a rock’n’roll revival.
Premiering this week at Sundance, the film is based on Lizzy Goodman’s 2017 book chronicling the city’s early-millennium rock boom (she also executive produced). The sprawling, 600-page oral history would be all but impossible to condense into a single feature, so directors Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern narrow their focus to mainly just the first few years of the 2000s, and only a handful of representative bands: the Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, TV on the Radio, the Rapture, and LCD Soundsystem, along with early scene linchpins the Moldy Peaches. And the film relies solely on archival footage and audio, without any talking-head shots to break the nostalgia. The result helps demystify an often-mythologized era in a way that could inspire some future assemblage of talented misfits to start their own movement. Another plus: The music, pretty uniformly, rips.
For a scene almost instantly saddled with unrealistic expectations, Meet Me in the Bathroom reinforces the role of serendipity. Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O lived across the street from Sidewalk Cafe, the former Avenue A institution that welcomed the Moldy Peaches, who opened for the Strokes on their first UK tour. Part of the documentary’s charm is seeing the pre-fame Strokes light up a bar with their shot-fueled charisma, or witnessing Karen O’s transformation, after four margaritas, into one of rock’s most commanding performers.
The film touches on serious topics too. O grapples with feeling like an outsider on multiple levels, as a half-white, half-Korean woman in an aggressively misogynist milieu. TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe likens telling his Nigerian immigrant parents he wanted to be an artist to coming home in clown shoes. Meet Me in the Bathroom also offers a poignant snapshot of New York City and its inevitable treatment of the 9/11 attacks benefits from an on-the-ground perspective—literally, in the case of Interpol’s Paul Banks, who emerges as one of the most compelling figures here, striding through the ashes of the World Trade Center, vaguely realizing the scale of tragedy. Dawson, once again, brings some necessary perspective with her song “Anthrax,” which documents the destruction in surreal, excruciating detail.
Even considering the film’s streamlined focus in comparison to the book, there are moments when it tries to do too much. Tales of LCD Soundsystem (the directors’ previous documentary subjects) and the Rapture (“the disco Strokes”!) don’t neatly cohere with the central narrative of the Strokes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ rise and the ensuing pressures that nearly broke each band’s members. The spread of online file-sharing was clearly an important industry development at the time, but juxtaposing Interpol’s good-natured disappointment when their 2004 album Antics leaks early with the requisite images of Steve Jobs and Napster interrupts the old-school flow. And does this film really need to quote the same Walt Whitman poem not once but twice?
Generally, though, keeping the film centered in an early-’00s, street-level perspective allows the music to shine. It’s a thrill seeing the Strokes wow stage-jumping British fans, revisiting the uncanny brilliance of TV on the Radio’s “Ambulance,” and witnessing LCD Soundsystem becoming a band in real time in an unhinged rendition of “Daft Punk Is Playing at My House” where Murphy howls like Jim Morrison. The concert that best illustrates the film’s power takes place in a Williamsburg parking lot about a year after 9/11, as local heroes Liars’ stage-stalking skronk leads up to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ garage-rock anthem “Our Time.” In this moment, when Karen O sings, “It’s our year to be hated/So glad that we made it,” it’s as if the words are coming true as she murmurs them.
As is the case with almost any document of New York rock, there’s a lot of talk in the film about “cool.” Interpol’s Banks, stuffing envelopes for his job at the time in the admissions office at Yeshiva Union, knows the Strokes are cooler than he is; Casablancas claims that if he’d heard of a band as cool, rich, and good-looking as the Strokes, he’d probably “think they were assholes”; Murphy explains LCD’s popularity by saying, “because theoretically we’re… cool.” At this point, in the realm of mainstream influence at least, this theoretical coolness feels trapped in amber: Although rock has recently recaptured both the charts and festival lineups, young millennials’ and Gen Z’s nostalgia seems more likely to lean toward emo and pop-punk.
What stands out most here is how many of these bands recall forming because, first and foremost, they were friends: weirdos seeking other weirdos. At that parking lot show in Williamsburg, O remembers how she could feel the love from her community, “like a current flowing through me.” Two decades later, that sense of camaraderie could be the scene’s most moving legacy.
