Rejoice! The Neil Young Rock Doc Is Here

The rock documentary is one of the most unfuckwithable filmmaking genres (with the exception of Metallica’s Some Kind of Monster). There’s classics such as Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock, D.A. Pennebaker’s Bob Dylan film Don’t Look Back, and the Maysles brothers’ Gimme Shelter, which looked at the Rolling Stones infamous Altamont concert. And the canon continues to grow with modern iterations such as the docu-series Shangri-La on super producer Rick Rubin and HBO’s 4 Your Eyez Only on J.Cole. To that list, we can now add Mountaintop, a new behind-the-scenes documentary on the making of Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s album Colorado.

The trailer for Mountaintop, which opens in theaters on October 22, starts off with Young, at his cantankerous best, exclaiming “I want it up as loud as it can go!” and then proceeds to show snippets of the Crazy Horse frontman (and star of arguably the greatest Supreme photo tee) laboring to get exactly what he wants.

One of the things that makes rock documentaries so compelling is that they reflect the interpersonal drama that goes into the creative process. Unlike artists and writers, whose pursuits tend to be more solitary, musicians inevitably need to work with others—whether it’s an engineer or a band member—who have differing, and strongly held, opinions. That tension makes for good viewing. Remember, Young’s feelings about audio fidelity once led him to create an iPod competitor (Pono, anyone?). So it’s clear he’s willing to go to great lengths to prove a point, which should be interesting to see in Mountaintop.

None of this would matter if the music sucked. But based on what can be gleaned from the trailer, Colorado promises all of the fuzzy, reverb-y, crackly goodness that makes Young’s music so powerful.

Watch the trailer below. For more information, including a screening schedule, go to mountaintopthemovie.com.