There’s plenty of great stuff in this documentary to keep super fans happy – but you only need to know 80s banger Livin’ on a Prayer to get emotional as the ageing band break down before your very eyes
very pop biography has the same dilemma: fans of the artist want to know all the details, while viewers with only a passing interest just want to get to the good stuff. You can tell which side of the line Thank You, Goodnight: TheBy far the strongest instalment is the opener, which can be watched in isolation as an evocative charge through the period leading up to the band’s formation and breakthrough.
In clubs such as the Fast Lane, the Upstage and the Stone Pony, singers including Southside Johnny and a rapidly rising Bruce Springsteen play blue-collar rock mixed with blue-eyed soul. Handsome, ambitious John Bongiovi and his nerdy pianist sidekick, David Bryan, are awestruck audience members by the age of 16, and are soon on stage themselves with their covers band, the Atlantic City Expressway. They get home from gigs in Bryan’s van at 5am, then get up again at 7am and go to high school.
By 1983, Bongiovi has met his musical soulmate, guitarist Richie Sambora, and named himself and his new band Bon Jovi, the two-word styling a homage to Van Halen. Episode two tracks the group as they release a brace of reputation-building albums followed by a third LP, Slippery When Wet, that sells 14m copies.
Bon Jovi take themselves too seriously. At least, to us they do, but the documentary points up the tension, in an ephemeral art form, between performer and consumer. Viewers with the correct view of Bon Jovi’s oeuvre – Bad Medicine and You Give Love a Bad Name are bangers, and Livin’ on a Prayer is an almost heartbreakingly perfect work of art, but everything else is cheesy stodge – have to reckon with footage shot in 2022, behind the scenes on the band’s comeback US tour.
Being blindsided by a surprisingly devastating rumination on lost youth bolsters the lesson you’re rewarded with if you sit through all of Thank You, Goodnight: that three-minute throwaway track you half-listen to on the radio is the culmination of somebody’s life’s work. All that life is here.
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