I obviously wasn't going to miss out on a documentary on King Crimson. I just did not expect it to be this. Don't get me wrong, I think it's fantastic. Possibly, to a significant extent, accidentally fantastic, but fantastic nonetheless. What do I mean by accidentally fantastic? Well, I can only speculate, but it feels like the director Toby Amies is undertaking this documentary in good faith, with Robert Fripp's blessing (Fripp is one of the co-founders and the only constant member of King Crimson throughout it's 50+ years of existence.) And yet literally from the get go, Fripp is undermining him, interrupting interviews. What emerges is a bizarre duality where on the one hand Fripp wants the genuine story told of what King Crimson is about, and on the other hand fundamentally disagrees with what that story is. There's a lot of bitterness around King Crimson, and a lot of it is directed at Fripp. A lot of previous band members are interviewed and they are bitter about their experience, and yet at the same time feel like they have betrayed Fripp. Then another layer to the movie comes from Bill Rieflin, a fun and easy going musician in the band. Rieflin feels like the polar opposite of Fripp yet to Fripp he's his closest friend and the only one who understand him. But Rieflin has stage 4 colon cancer. He knows he's dying, but he's still touring with Crimson, because he's got very little time left (in his own word) and there's nothing he'd rather be doing. In a sense, Rieflin is an accidental metaphor for King Crimson itself. They are touring, they are playing possibly the best they have ever played, but there's nothing new. They are rehashing the old catalog, to the audience's delight. But as Adrian Belew (very bitter) puts it when interviewed, King Crimson was always about reinventing itself. Where is that gone ? Ultimately, the overarching theme of the documentary is the sacrifices musicians make in the name of music. To Fripp, nothing can stand in the way of the music, and that's why so many people think he's a horrible person to work with. Rieflin, in his own way, understood that. It's a fascinating outlook on a fascinating band, and the best thing about it is you don't even have to know or enjoy King Crimson's music to be fascinated by the movie. It's a movie about humans making music.
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