Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band (2019)

Directed by: Daniel Roher | 100 minutes | documentary, biography, music

A documentary about The Band with media-shy core member Robbie Robertson as the main talking head, that should pay off, right? Certainly, the guitarist of the supergroup that dissolved in 1978 is responsible for most of The Band’s songs (including ‘The Weight’), but it is telling that while watching this documentary you should take a look at the Wiki to check whether it’s all right.

Something is not right, thinks the music lover who is interested in journalism. ‘Once Were Brothers’ is not a form of historiography, it is the authorized biography of Robertson in The Band. Like grandpa looking back, Robbie reads his own memoirs; he is perhaps just too modest for explicit self-congratulation, but in any case it is extremely boring, this precise form of hagiography.

As if rock ‘n’ roll can be rewritten by the good guy. Sometimes it works for a while, when Robertson discusses the genesis of the masterpiece ‘The Weight’, for example. The first sounds on the guitar, the polyphonic choruses from the chorus, beautifully recreated by the songwriter himself, as if he carved the song out of wood and started singing the wood.

A plaster on the wound for the fact that this documentary produced by Martin Scorsese has no answer. As a result, ‘Once Were Brothers’ has become a one-sided venture, Robbie Robertson’s story written by director and fellow Canadian Roher. That would have kept the band afloat, despite the drug problems of the rest of The Band.

Nota bene: in 1978 Scorsese filmed the farewell concert of The Band (‘The Last Waltz’) and at the time the singer/drummer Levon Helm, who died in 2012, accused the filmmaker of taking Robertson’s side; in the 1980s, the band reunited, without Robertson. Was it really not possible to talk to Robertson with a bigger role for others? ‘Once Were Brothers’ makes you long for a juicy story, one that will probably never come again.