Morgan Neville makes warm, well-connected documentaries about music and the people around it, and at his best he gets a subject to sit still and be heard. At his least, he is too fond of them to ask the hard question.
Fi1m perspective
The best thing Morgan Neville has put on a screen is somebody else's voice with the famous part taken out. In 20 Feet from Stardom (2013) he strips the Rolling Stones from Gimme Shelter and leaves Merry Clayton's vocal alone, the one she recorded in the middle of the night in 1969, cracking on the top note and carrying on. We had heard the song a few hundred times and never heard her, and when the tape ran out we found we had gone quite still. That is Neville's method in a single cut: find the person a little behind the star, clear a space, and let them be heard.
He came to film from journalism, in New York and San Francisco, moved into production in 1993 and founded Tremolo Productions in 1999. The early work was music documentaries, on Brian Wilson, Muddy Waters and Johnny Cash, and music has stayed the way in even as the subjects have widened. Best of Enemies (2015) uses the 1968 debates between Buckley and Vidal to look at how the media learned to argue; Won't You Be My Neighbor? (2018) is a portrait of Fred Rogers; Roadrunner (2021) is an account of Anthony Bourdain built from close access and his own materials; Piece by Piece (2024) tells Pharrell Williams's story in animated Lego bricks. He has said that the best music films are not about music, that music is just the language for telling a story about culture. It is a fair description of what he does.
What works is access and patience. He gets Darlene Love to tell, herself, how she sang leads that went out under other groups' names and was cleaning houses in middle age before she got back on a stage, and he has the sense to let her be funny about it. He gets Lisa Fischer to admit she has the voice and not the appetite, and he does not argue with her. He lets the stars queue up to give credit, Mick Jagger and Sting and Bette Midler, and keeps the camera on the women they are crediting.
What does not work is the follow-up. 20 Feet from Stardom says plainly that the singers were mostly Black, the stars mostly white and the money went one way, and then it changes the subject; nobody from a record company sits down, and a thought from Sting about luck is taken as a conclusion. The same softness has been noticed elsewhere. Roadrunner was found admiring to the point of hagiography, and its use of an artificial recreation of Bourdain's voice, not disclosed in the film, was a poor decision that a former journalist should have seen coming. Neville likes his subjects, which is why they talk to him, and it is also why he lets them off.
Start with 20 Feet from Stardom, for Clayton and Love. Go on to the rest knowing that Neville will give you the person and, more often than not, spare them.
Biography
Morgan Neville is an American documentary filmmaker, producer and writer. Born in Los Angeles in 1967, he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a BFA and worked as a journalist in New York City and San Francisco before entering film production in 1993. He founded Tremolo Productions in 1999.
Neville is best known for 20 Feet from Stardom (2013), which he directed and produced; the film won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and a Grammy Award for Best Music Film. His other notable documentaries include Best of Enemies (2015), Won't You Be My Neighbor? (2018) and Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain (2021). He has received multiple Grammy nominations and an Emmy Award.
