DVDBLURAY&TV
BEASTIE BOYS STORY
APPLETV
7/10
Rap pranksters reunite with long-time visual collaborator Spike Jonze on this bittersweet bio-doc. By Stephen Dalton
A WARMLY nostalgic celebration with a side order of guilty confession, Beastie Boys Story is a testament to the goodwill that the New York rock-rap trio still enjoy today, eight years after the death of Adam “MCA” Yauch called time on their three-decade career. Directed by long-time Beasties insider Spike Jonze, this stylised documentary is essentially a spoken-word concert film based on Beastie Boys Book, the mammoth 2018 autobiography compiled by surviving members Mike Diamond and Adam Horovitz. Shot at the King’s Theatre in Brooklyn over three nights last year, it was scheduled for a big-screen premiere at the SXSW festival in Texas back in March, before the coronavirus crisis shunted it to an online launch on AppleTV instead.
Inevitably, distilling almost 600 pages into two hours of stage chat has meant sacrificing much of the book’s depth and detail. But there are gains as well as losses here, not least the quickfire montages of
