Stop Making Sense
First screened and reviewed in August 2025
Director: Jonathan Demme. Documentary of Talking Heads concert performances from their Speaking in Tongues tour. In Brief:
I'm not built to love this, and I see some limitations. Still, a lively, evocative snapshot of creative synergy.
VOR:⑤
"Greatest concert documentary" is not a claim I can vet, but technical innovations, cultural influence, and directorial leap are prodigious.
Look, you'd have a hard time finding less of a concert person than I am. When I was in college, I saw one of the formative artists of my life, PJ Harvey, live and close-up in a small Boston club during her tour for Is This Desire? Only my second concert. She and John Parish and the rest of the band—but especially she—absolutely killed. I had an indelibly blissful time. And I still preferred listening to the album at home.
I didn't go to another concert for 20 years, when my brother, two years in a row, asked me for his birthday to join him in my own city for two shows by his favorite, U2. Those guys know exactly what they're doing and put on a spectacular spectacular with astounding energy, but I just didn't feel like myself while I was listening and watching, and had no sense of bondedness with the crowd, which I do feel in movie theaters all the time. Haven't been to another concert since and have no plans to; it's not how I relate to music. I appreciate this analogy will strike people as bizarre, but I wouldn't want to be there while an author rewrote a book, live and onstage, that I already loved more intimately in its published form, or while a painter re-painted some of her newest but also some of her best-known canvases in front of me and a bunch of people I don't know. I will hold down a dance floor for hours—that's a whole different ball game—but keep me away from your venue and your re-instrumentations and your acolytes who are in heaven. I love that for them, and leave it to them.
So, sure, Stop Making Sense might be the greatest concert film ever made, as so many people say. I can totally dig it technically: it's wondrously easy to forget the camera is even there, except when David Byrne makes a point of engaging with it. The editing is an Oscar-level feat, serving the carefully orchestrated momentum of the set list and the staging, and capturing with impeccable timing, intricacy, and breadth the musical and (somewhat guarded) personal interplay among the Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs outfit that is Talking Heads. The quality of sound is strikingly high for any live-recorded event, much less a boisterous concert.
The movie feels like a loving, loyal preservation of a 90-minute event as conceived by the artists and as it transpired on site (yes, I know, on four different nights) but also just as much like a postmodern gallery proposition. Here is a soup can, here is a high heel on a short pillar, here is a banana masking-taped to a wall, here are the Talking Heads: reflect. And there's plenty of stuff to reflect about! Is this the most democratic, loosely-bordered, and fluidly collaborative pop band in history, or is it really the David Byrne Show, filtered through a whole gaggle of clearly talented companions exercising their own creativity but only to a point? Is it magical and/or a little unsettling that all this musicality and eccentricity pour out of Byrne, this bendy toothpaste tube of a man, into whom it's impossible to see even one inch? Is it by artistic design or is it a shortcoming worth flagging that the songs come so close to sounding the same in this presentation, and that all the playful, meticulous, surrealist storytelling in the lyrics isn't really getting a chance to flourish, given Byrne's vigorous but relentless and somewhat inhuman delivery, and given how the music itself is so clearly privileged over the words? (The clue to that one is in the title, I guess!) Is the whole thing a loose, jolly, eclectic rejoinder to a mid-80s ethos of increasingly workified life and ever more machinic entertainment? Or do Byrne's emotional remove, the unclear vibe among the bandmates, and the sidelining of all the fans till the finale amplify a very 80s sense that we've just watched a talented, diverse, reasonably fond office group clock in and clock out of a merrily exhausting job?
All of this makes Stop Making Sense into a rich object of contemplation and a more layered experience, performatively and conceptually, than is necessarily the default in this genre. But I can't say I got that into it as a movie. I'll say it again: this is probably more of a me thing than a Stop Making Sense thing. Either way, I just didn't feel the raptures so often reported. I was charmed by the loosy-goosey energy on stage (all so Demme!!), but less so by some of the strenuous strategizing of loosy-goosiness, or by that drawn-out, climactic, diminishing-returns version of "Take Me to the River," or by that unsteady live rendition of "Genius of Love," a decade before Mariah and especially her remix improved the song. (I said what I said!) The energy palpably dissipates from Stop Making Sense during the latter interlude, which doesn't at all feel like what should happen during "Genius of Love." It also feels not coincidental that as soon as Byrne has left the stage for his bandmates to do their thing as a semi-separate enterprise (generosity or jealousy on his part?), he comes back in his iconic and showstopping maxi-suit, a beat that more or less confirms that the egalitarian ambience of the evening(s) still swirls around an individual who shan't be upstaged. All of that serves to make Stop Making Sense even more interesting to consider but also, for me, less fun?
Maybe I just need to feel the music more, and it needs to mean something to me personally. I could watch Dave Chappelle's Block Party every night till I die and call it a fulfilling life, because a lot of those artists mean a lot to me, and they're my version of danceable. But also, whether it makes Block Party "better," or more of what I'd call a movie, or just way more my speed, Gondry and Chappelle and the various acts on stage, plus all the crucial, colorful characters from Ohio to Brooklyn, make that film so much more than "just" the already-grand concert at its heart. It's a world, and it just keeps growing, despite all the forces that work against its coming together. By contrast, Stop Making Sense evinces, maybe inevitably, the same balance or paradox that defines Byrne: a centrifuge as well as a black hole, giving a lot at every moment, and fathomlessly talented, but also withholding nearly as much.
Still, in fairness to a movie I admired but only moderately enjoyed: if Stop Making Sense, or almost any concert movie, or almost any concert, were looking back at me as I watched, they'd see something similar to what I see in Byrne: a person who's there but also not there. Occasionally the "problem" with a movie is actually the spectator. And I hope I'm making pretty clear how much this movie offers to enjoy, admire, feel, and contemplate. It's not quite my cuppa, and I was really hoping it would be... but just as there are mediocre movies we can't help loving, there are others that slightly rankle or rebuff us despite being substantial and impressive pieces of work. Grade:B+
Awards:
National Society of Film Critics: Best Documentary
