Dig! Review

When director Ondi Timoner set out to make this documentary about the music industry, her intention was to make a film that explored the relationship between art and commerce by following bands on the rise. However, when she started filming retro-San Francisco outfit The Brian Jonestown Massacre (described in the film as "The Velvet Underground of the 1990s") and their friends and fellow ironic 1960s revivalists, The Dandy Warhols, she found herself caught in the middle of something much more interesting: a kind of hipster, real-life soap-opera replete with drugs, jealousies and violent bust-ups between two egotistical bands who both love and loathe each other.

Kicking off in 1996, when both bands were attracting significant label interest and supporting each other on and off stage, the film follows them for the next seven years as their careers take an increasingly divergent course. The Dandy Warhols - described by head Dandy, Courtney Taylor-Taylor, as "the most well-adjusted band in America" - sign to Capitol but quickly stumble when the vast sums of money the label pours into promoting them - mainly via needlessly expensive videos - doesn't translate into immediate record sales. Meanwhile The BJM can't even score a record deal thanks to their naive mad-genius of a frontman Anton Newcombe, who seems to think success and credibility are mutually exclusive, and subsequently seems intent on sabotaging every opportunity presented to the band with constant infighting and drug addiction.

The drama surrounding both situations, particularly as it starts having an adverse effect on the friendship between the bands, makes for horrifically compelling viewing, but Timoner has also stayed true to her original mission. Dig! is a penetrating insight into the mercenary nature of an industry that operates with a staggering 90 per cent failure rate and which has little room for high-minded notions like integrity.