The Wrecking Crew

An entertaining and compelling story about music’s unsung heroes.

Nostalgia trips are fun, but when they intersect with genius, virtuosity and genuine revelatory insight, they take viewers to a higher place.

As a love letter to the director’s late father, The Wrecking Crew sparkles. As a potentially comprehensive, context-rich chronicle of one of pop music’s most inspired engines of rhythm and melody, it mostly sticks to one note.

The enlightening and necessary film, narrated by an adoring Denny, is very much in the vein of 2002’s "Standing in the Shadows of Motown," a documentary that celebrated the Funk Brothers, the criminally unheralded house band at Berry Gordy Jr.’s hit-making studio in Detroit. But where "Standing in the Shadows" of Motown used re-enactments and new live performances, The Wrecking Crew is composed mostly of archival footage and newish interviews.

There are a thousand stories to be told in the studios where these session players cut some of the greatest records of all time, which makes it disappointing that there isn't more to be found in the documentary The Wrecking Crew.

The crew's recollections and occasional demonstrations, on their instruments, are revealing and delightful, but the film itself could use more of their professionalism and chops; the editing's haphazard, and it's not always clear why one segment follows another.

Overall, the documentary comes off as a solipsistic, uncritical look at an incredible moment in the history of American music.

A noble, heartfelt attempt at telling the back story behind the unsung heroes of 60s rock and pop music -- the studio musicians who made the music brilliant but received no credit for their efforts. And, while large portions of the film respectfully pay tribute to these little-known artists, there are also many interview segments that are a little too "inside" to be fully appreciated by an audience that probably doesn't know much about the subject to begin with. Regrettably, it feels like the filmmakers were a little too close to their material to step back and fully appreciate how viewers might react to it.

Some good music history, lots of great clips of hits from the 60's and 70's and short interviews with Brian Wilson, Glen Campbell, Nancy Sinatra and many others. Gives some long overdue credit to a dozen or so great session musicians who played on hundreds of songs from that period. But the storytelling tends to be repetitive and doesn't go very deep. The movie doesn't really pull you in. If this music was important to you then this can be worth seeing, but if not then you may not need to see this.