‘The Best Summer’ review: Foo Fighters and Beastie Boys star in nostalgic rock-doc

Fancy going back to 1995, on tour with Beastie Boys, Sonic Youth and Foo Fighters? This documentary may be as close as you’re going to get. Recently premiering at Sundance Film Festival in Utah, it’s the result of a box of video tapes discovered by Tamra Davis, as she was fleeing her Malibu home during the Palisades fires last year. The tapes were recorded in 1995, when the director had just married Mike D. She joined him on the ‘Summersault’ tour of Australia with a Sony Hi8 camcorder. 

Davis took her camera onto the stage, and into the audience, showing both adoring fans and musical moments that have rarely, if ever, been shown elsewhere. As well as the aforementioned bands, there are performances from Pavement, Rancid, Beck, Bikini Kill, Kim Deal’s the Amps… The camerawork can be shaky, and the sound is inevitably raw, but that suits this patchwork fanzine of a film that has the benefit of an insider gaze. 

What feels even more exclusive are the backstage moments. Teaming up with Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna, whose work she’d been championing, Davis captures candid post-show scenes and interviews performers based on Kathleen’s stock questions. These start off cutely naive (“What’s your favourite colour/food?”) but get revealing results when she quizzes musicians about being on stage about what they enjoy, what they don’t, if they have an alternative persona… Dave Grohl – then a big fan of “Slim Jim” meat sticks, since you asked – talks about hating having to talk to the audience. Kim Gordon speaks about taking on personalities, sometimes inspired by films. Adam Horovitz flirts. Soon, that particular Beastie Boy would start a relationship with Hanna, and this grabs fleeting moments of their early encounters. 

An interview with the young Beck is followed by an even earlier appearance from Coco Gordon Moore, daughter of Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, who was on tour with her parents before she could walk. Most poignant is footage of Beastie’s Adam Yauch, 17 years before he died of cancer. 

The cultural backdrop shifts when a few of the bands go on to play in Southeast Asia. Excited fans in Jakarta are watched by stick-wielding police. Beastie Boys have been banned from Singapore, but make an impression in Thailand and beyond. Footage of them partying in their hotel room shows members of the band getting high while their hand washed clothes are drying in the background. 

There’s a lot that isn’t shown, or told, here: information cards are brief and subtitles could be used more. You feel like you’re piecing all this together with Davis, without the benefit of her memories. But it’s still a fascinating, nostalgic insight into these iconic bands in their youth, in a time before camera phones and social media, when a woman with a video camera was a rare curiosity. Tamra Davis, Kathleen Hanna and Kim Gordon all hit Sundance for the premiere of The Best Summer, underlining the female gaze of this time capsule that’s well worth digging up.

‘The Best Summer’ is touring at international film festivals.