It’s obviously impossible to cover even a fraction of the book in a 100 minute documentary, but the filmmakers accomplish a couple things that the book couldn’t.

1) the faces: it’s easy, when reading the book, to forget how young these people were when they blew up. And it’s one thing to read about youthful foolishness, it’s another to see Julian Casablancas acting like a dipshit on the subway at age 18 or whatever. Or Karen O looking like a disaster during the tour before Fever To Tell came out. Or James Murphy looking like a nervous, anxious 30-something (!) playing Daft Punk live for the first time.

2) the music: hearing live, rough, low-quality recordings of early performances helps capture the vibe of the low-rent, scrappy scene. Hearing Paul Banks describe his depression as the video transitions into an early, slow, loose performance of Untitled hits like a hammer. A full performance of Maps is used in full at the emotional climax of the film, and it’s devastating.

It also makes Ryan Adams look like a dirtbag, so I guess case closed on that one.

The film highlights a few threads more clearly than the book does, such as David Holmes’ influence on James Murphy, and the tensions between DFA and the Rapture in the lead up to their defection to another label.

Those features make it an essential companion to the book, but I’m not sure it has much impact on its’ own. There are several artists that are key to the book that never appear in the film – Jonathan Fire*Eater, Jack White, Har Mar Superstar and Juan Maclean among them. It doesn’t really dive into the intra-band dynamics. There’s no real prologue or epilogue, so the story arc is a little lacking. It does a terrible job of explaining why Interpol fits into the scene, or the trials that they faced as a band, aside from Antics leaking to file-sharing platforms before its release.

At any rate, if you’ve read the book, see the film and vice-versa. Like a great lineup at a rock show, they each have distinct strengths that make the whole thing richer.