Oscar Isaac, Justin Timberlake and Adam Driver in a scene from 'Inside Llewyn Davis.'Alison Rosa/The Associated Press
In Eden, director Mia Hansen-Love draws a portrait of a time: the early nineties and the electronic dance music scene that created the "French touch" phenomenon. There have been a number of other process-focused films that helped define the birth of a new form of musical expression.
Folk
Inside Llewyn Davis (2013): "If it's never new, and it never gets old, it's folk music," says a character in Joel and Ethan Coen's study of an almost successful folk singer in the early sixties Greenwich Village coffee house scene, loosely based on singer Dave Van Ronk's memoir . While the film is fictional, it's easy to trace versions of many well-known acts (the Clancy Brothers; Ramblin' Jack Elliott; Peter, Paul and Mary) and a milieu that combined a respect for tradition and authenticity with a fair amount of naked ambition.
Rock
American Hot Wax (1978): "You can stop me, but you're never gonna stop rock 'n' roll," declares DJ Alan Freed (Tim McIntire), the hero of this story about the Cleveland radio announcer who pushed integrating the music, supposedly coined the term "rock and roll" and went down with the payola scandals. The story focuses on a brief period in Freed's life, leading to the historic 1959 live stage show at the Paramount Theatre in Brooklyn, which features Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis and Screamin' Jay Hawkins playing themselves .
Almost Famous (2000): Cameron Crowe's semi-autobigraphical story of a teen rock journalist, Almost Famous is set in 1973, perhaps the most decidedly in-between year in rock history. "It's just a shame you missed out on rock 'n' roll," explains rock critic Lester Bangs (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman). "It's over. You got here just in time for the death rattle. The last gasp. Last grope." It's a story about innocence amid decadence, where rock bands gamble for groupies.
Hip hop
Beat Street (1984): "Should I die on the train track like Ramo in Beat Street/People at my funeral frontin' like they miss me?" asked the Notorious B.I.G. in his song Suicidal Thoughts. Written a decade after Beat Street was released, the song shows how much the film, which starred Canadian actress Rae Dawn Chong, became a cultural touchstone for the style the South Bronx gave the world. Following a DJ, his break-dancing younger brother and their Puerto Rican graffiti artist friend, Beat Street is a melodrama about the high price of making it, that promoted hip-hop culture worldwide. The film includes early performances from Grandmaster Melle Mel and the Furious Five, Doug E. Fresh, Afrika Bambaataa & Soulsonic Force and the Treacherous Three, including Kool Moe Dee. Beat Street will be shown July 31 at TIFF Bell Lightbox. Along with Wild Style (which screened last week), it's considered one of the cornerstone films of the hip-hop movement.
Jazz
Round Midnight (1986): "My life is music. My love is music. And it's 24 hours a day," says sax player Dale Turner (played by real-life jazz musician Dexter Gordon) in Bertrand Tavernier's ode to American jazz musicians living in Paris in the 1950s. The character is a composite of saxophonist Lester Young and pianist Bud Powell, loosely based on a memoir, Dance of the Infidels by French author Francis Paudras.
Bird (1988): Clint Eastwood's highly respected 1988 feature about Charlie Parker (Forest Whitaker) isolated the musician's solos from their original recordings and added contemporary sidemen (including Herbie Hancock, who also provided the score for Round Midnight) in a story that spends a lot of time in dark motels and smoky nightclubs, which focuses on Parker's struggle with drugs and alcohol that led to an early death at 34.
Musical theatre
Topsy-Turvy (1999): English director Mike Leigh is a director obsessed with process, and this salute to his English forebears, W.S. Gilbert (Jim Broadbent) and composer Sir Arthur Sullivan (Allan Corduner), is very much about the life behind the show – in this case, the career-salvaging The Mikado. Homelessness, prostitution, abortion and drug use are just a few of the less savoury parts of Victorian society shown as the background to G&S's wonderfully silly escapist comic operas.