Everyday Sunshine: Remember the '80s? Remember Fishbone?

Ann Summa/Tilapia Film

The group in its '80s prime.

Location Info

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Grand Illusion

1403 N.E. 50th St.
Seattle, WA 98105

Category: Movie Theaters

Region: University District

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Runs at Grand Illusion, Fri., Nov. 18–Thurs., Nov. 24. Not rated. 107 minutes.

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More About

• Fishbone
• Lev Anderson
• Chris Metzler
• Documentaries
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media

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"They should have been the band that went way beyond any of us who were influenced by them," says Primus' Les Claypool in this new documentary about the groundbreaking African-American band Fishbone. Co-directed by Lev Anderson and Chris Metzler, Everyday Sunshine is a love letter to the group. Packed with fantastic performance footage, the film solidly makes the case that, throughout the '80s and early '90s, Fishbone was one of rock's best live acts ever—furiously energetic, innovative, leaping multiple genres in a single song. A slew of talking heads, from Vernon Reid to Gwen Stefani (who should pay Fishbone frontman Angelo Moore royalties), sing the group's praises as Laurence Fishburne narrates a whiplash-inducing career ride: High-school friends form a punk/ska/funk/fill-in-the-blanks band, create groundbreaking music, travel the world, influence countless other bands, but crash and burn before achieving the success they deserve. The reasons for liftoff failure are familiar: record-label ineptitude, love/hate dynamics within the group that eventually gave way to alcoholism, mental breakdowns, and bitterness. Anderson and Metzler get it all down but are so enamored of the band that they don't shape their material as tightly as they could have, and it occasionally drifts into redundancy. An unexpected upside to the film is its timeliness. As conversation about "post-blackness" drifts from the art world and academia onto the op-ed pages—see Touré's controversial new book Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness?—it's refreshing to hear group members repeatedly stress that their art was rooted in black culture and consciousness as the film itself becomes a dialectic on black masculinity.