THE STORY – Immersive POV camera footage reveals electric performances, candid interviews, and intimate backstage life with Beastie Boys, Sonic Youth, Foo Fighters, Pavement, Rancid, Beck, The Amps, and Bikini Kill — an all-access view inside an era-defining moment in music.
THE CAST – Kathleen Hanna
THE TEAM – Tamra Davis (Director)
THE RUNNING TIME – 84 Minutes
It’s not an original notion to bemoan the constant presence of recording devices in everyday life nowadays. Knowing that anytime you enter into a public space, every person you see has a tiny camera in their pocket makes it easy to feel on edge at all times. Any potential embarrassing moment, every piece of gum stepped in or curb tripped over, is one phone camera click away from going viral to millions. It’s hard to let go and be your authentic self with this cursed knowledge. This is profoundly, and most disappointingly, felt in places of gathered general joy. Clubs and concert halls are now packed with people too nervous to fully unleash and let the music take them. Tamra Davis’s documentary “The Best Summer” is a found-footage (literally, the film opens with her finding the forgotten footage while evacuating from wildfires in 2025) compilation of clips from, as you can probably guess from the title, one amazing summer the director experienced. But this isn’t just videos of pool parties and campfires. This summer (albeit a summer in late December and early January, given the film mostly takes place in Australia) was spent on the road with a handful of young rock musicians. The film is an ode to a time gone by, when a camera pointed in your face was an exciting rarity rather than a common cause for alarm. Davis captures unbridled, shameless exuberance from both the people onstage and, even more refreshingly, from down in the audience pit. What it lacks in structure, it tries to make up for in warm, nostalgic energy, though this feeling can only last so long and only take a film so far.
It’s 1995. Tamra Davis’s film “Billy Madison” was released earlier in the year, and, with a break in her schedule, she joined the Summersault Tour. The indie music tour featured musical acts that were the contemporary definition of “cool,” including the Beastie Boys, Sonic Youth, Foo Fighters, Rancid, Beck, and Bikini Kill. Davis admittedly lacked a strong motivating purpose or plan for shooting her backstage footage. As she puts it in the film, “We’re just doing this ’cause we’re bored. Maybe we’ll edit it together and give everybody a copy, like a memento.” But she didn’t just follow the acts around backstage and capture their performances (although there’s plenty of the latter). She made a point to have the musicians sit down and film a standard interview, usually framed around a set of six questions that remained the same no matter who was being asked them. And although Davis held the camera, as shown in this film, most of the interviews were actually conducted by Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill.
The film quickly settles into an easy rhythm. An interview is held, then we see footage from that interviewee live in concert. And repeat and repeat and repeat. It takes a while for the film to break form; notably, they have to leave Australia for a disruption in the standard interview questions. In “The Best Summer,” Davis lets her long, long interviews play out in lengthy, uninterrupted clips, only rivaled by the long, long performance videos. The interviews themselves have more depth to them than 1995’s eye-rolling parents of Gen X kids probably thought the musicians were capable of (they even all have an answer to the question “What book are you reading now?” Imagine that!). One chat with Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters goes into some truly revealing discussions about the nature of fame and public image. And although most of the questions revolve around simple “What’s your favorite…?” queries, the musicians are also asked the probing question “Is your stage personality different than your real personality?” It’s a fascinating question to highlight in a film that often jumps right from their answer to footage of them actually onstage. Given how raucous and uncontrollable most of their performances are in sharp contrast to their measured interviews, it can be concluded that, no matter their stated answer, the true answer for most of them is likely “yes.”
This exploration of the dichotomy between the public and private image is, by far, the most compelling aspect of “The Best Summer.” The film does little to comment on it, though, or anything else, as all of the 90s footage is presented as is, with the only messages from the present day coming in the form of super-brief on-screen text to provide context occasionally. As such, the long interview and performance clips tend to drag, and for those without familiarity with the artists, the film can be extremely tiring due to its repetition. The performances themselves are proudly unshowy. There are no sets, no dramatic stage effects, no flashy costumes; it’s just the musicians selling their songs through the power of live performance. However, this means they lack a cinematic quality, which is certainly not Davis’s fault, given that she’s merely capturing rather than directing them. Still, the film’s strategy of presenting unbroken concert clips doesn’t make for the most dynamic movie experience. The film isn’t helped by the poor sound quality of the mid-90s Sony camcorder Davis used to record them. Thank God for subtitles, because otherwise, the songs would truly just sound like muddled noise. Although one performance by Rancid later in the film of their song “Roots Radicals” is so energetic and enthusiastic that, even if it’s difficult to comprehend what they’re singing about, it’s impossible not to be swept up in the livewire energy.
The best anyone watching can hope to take away from the documentary, if they’re not watching as fans of the musicians, is the comforting feeling that comes from watching pleasant footage from the past. The film is unquestionably a fantastic time capsule of a period that many look back on fondly, especially given the turbulence of the present moment. It’s a good vibe, no doubt about it, but “The Best Summer” struggles to make for a compelling watch, despite the vibrant energy of the performers captured.
