Mike McCahill 

Heart Like a Hand Grenade review – Green Day rock doc hits too many bum notes

This one-night-only rock documentary lacks curiosity, with not enough insight into the band’s music
  
  

Green Day
Incorrigibly boyish … Green Day Photograph: record company handout

This deadeningly authorised cross-promotional item from Green Day suffers from that lack of curiosity common among one-night-only rock docs. Embedded with the pop-punks as they recorded their American Idiot opus, film-maker John Roecker soon fades into the furniture: the between-takes downtime is unrevealing, while sequences on the construction of Boulevard of Broken Dreams, and other songs, cut too early to polished live performances, before we can witness their craft. We get a passing sense of the band’s personalities – incorrigibly boyish, even as they head into fatherhood – yet there is nothing of substance on the music, or its notionally oppositional slant.

 

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