HBO’s Big Beautiful Billy Joel Documentary Delivers Maximum Piano Man Per Minute
The new two-part Billy Joel documentary on HBO Max, which is called Billy Joel: And So It Goes, has a five-hour runtime. Do you have five hours to get utterly blasted with Billy Joel’s biographical information? In this economy? I would understand if you do not. Your time might be better spent honing your grindset, like Anthony from “Movin’ Out,” stacking pennies at the corner store. But I watched the whole doc. That’s what I chose to do with my life. Don’t want to watch? Go ahead with your own life—leave me alone!!
Ah, sorry about that. I got a little too into the classic Billy Joel mindset. Experiencing five consecutive hours of his life in a curated filmic format will do that to you. “I have not forgiven myself for not being Beethoven.” “I wanted to make a sonic masterpiece.” “It don’t feel right, it ain’t gonna sound right.” “Fuck those guys.” “Fuck you!” These are all sound bites you will hear if you watch Billy Joel: And So It Goes, and continuous exposure to such energy may leave you with an Oyster Bay-sized chip on your shoulder, shadowboxing exploitative record executives and shortsighted music critics, even if your piano skills don’t stretch beyond “Heart and Soul.”
The doc, directed by Susan Lacy and Jessica Levin, is exhaustive, practically encyclopedic. If you like Billy Joel, well, you’ll have a good time seeing quite a lot of him (he participated fully in the doc’s creation), and if you don’t know anything about Billy Joel, you’ll be able to teach an introductory college course about the Long Island lad’s progression from Hicksville misfit to crankily ambitious piano man to World’s Most Normal Rock Star by movie’s end.
In structure, this is as standardized a documentary treatment as you could imagine: a longitudinal psychological study of William Martin Joel in the form of an endless parade of vintage photos and archival footage. The narration comes from the usual buffet of talking heads over black backgrounds. There Billy’s inner circle, including family members, business associates, longtime band members, and the fascinatingly polyvalent figure of Jon Small, a man who furnished Joel’s first professional musical collaborations (first in the 1960s jukebox band The Hassles, then in the metal-ish duo Attila), was rewarded for his efforts by having Joel more or less steal his wife from under his nose, and eventually went on to direct and produce several iconic ‘80s Billy Joel music videos. There are record executives, critics, and of course, the marquee artists who show up to pay their respects. Bruce Springsteen hoarsely compares the strength of Billy’s songwriting to the Rock of Gibraltar, as Bruce Springsteen will do. Nas describes “New York State of Mind” as “soothing” and “elegant.” Pink shows up at one point for a “Piano Man” discussion, because Pink is as passionate about appearing in music television as Billy Joel is about the piano.
The best thing about a boilerplate formal approach to a documentary is all the inevitable weirdness that approach might uncover. There are lots of oddities poking through the cracks of this presentation of Joel’s life, and I enjoyed watching them all emerge, from Joel’s reaction to checking himself in for psychological observation after two suicide attempts in his early twenties (“Oh, crap, I’m in the nuthouse”) to his wonderful follicular journey, which progresses from 1970s helmet hair to moussed yuppie ‘do to a contemporary buzzed-bald pate that, paired with a trim goatee, makes him look like someone who could be friends with my dad.
