★★★★ (4 out of 4)
At an exhaustive but never exhausting five hours in length, this two-part HBO docuseries on Billy Joel, casually named “And So It Goes," after one of the Piano Man’s more meditative songs, is essential viewing. Not just for Joel fans, who are legion, but for detractors who always rank this troubadour from Hicksville, Long Island on the second rung of pop-rock titans.
This is a portrait of the artist as a young punk who never lost his swagger (he’s now 76) or his virtuoso musicianship. Joel wrote and performed over 150 songs that take us from “Allentown” to “Zanzibar” and this doc from Susan Lacy and Jessica Levin of “American Masters” shows how Joel’s life and art intersect in ways that are intimate, enduring and eye-opening.
Hagiography is a word critics use to describe an idealized biography from someone who treats their subject like a saint. “And So It Goes” is not a hagiography—from it. Though warm and articulate in his sit-down interviews at the piano, Joel doesn’t gloss over his faults as a friend, lover, husband, father, collaborator and longtime boozer addict. He leaves professional criticism to music publications, especially Rolling Stone, to snark all over his music, which they do frequently and relentlessly, missing the classical music training that’s at the core of his craft and displayed beautifully in this documentary.
I reluctantly accept that a recently diagnosed brain disorder may break Billy’s stride, but what 'And So It Goes' tells us is that the music will always be there when we ask the piano man to 'sing us a song tonight.'
The doc begins with Joel’s early days as an awkward Jewish kid doing the band thing with The Hassles and Attila (amazingly awful) and falling in love with Elizabeth Weber, the wife of his best friend and bandmate Jon Small (She and Small had a son, whom Billy later adopted.) That betrayal left Joel suicidal. But he recovered enough to marry Elizabeth and make her his manager, a role that labeled her a controlling Yoko in the media, especially when they split.
For nearly four decades, Weber has not spoken about her love-hate bond with Joel. But she does here with remarkable candor, as does the cheated-on Small, and their participation speaks to the blunt force of this doc. It continues with Joel’s marriage to supermodel Christie Brinkley, the mother of their daughter Alexa. Both well-up in their interviews with love and regret. Joel does not, as if the cost of those lost loves has been long ago internalized. But both Weber and Brinkley emerge as women of heart and mind in defiance of their one-note public images.
Joel when he wore a younger man's clothes (left) and during a recent concert (right) in "And So It Goes," from HBO/MAX
Still, the filmmakers make it clear that Joel’s defining relationships are with his possibly bipolar mother and the father who deserted them both for his own musical career in Vienna. That city is the title of one of Joe’s deepest and most revealing songs about his identity as a Jew and an artist. He never speaks the word “hurt,” but you can feel it every time he mentions his father, later returned to Billy’s life without ever finding the closeness that at least Billy craved.
We get it all, from the hits and star-making machinery to the bankruptcy and the too easy betrayal of friends (music producer Phil Ramone is fired with indiscriminate speed). “And So It Goes” paints a living portrait of Billy Joel through his music, which takes on fresh shades of meaning as we learn more about the events and feelings that drive every song.
And oh those songs. Gorgeously rendered archival footage gives us young Billy on stage hard-hitting “Movin’ Out” or caressing “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” into a one-act play. Then a switch to the seasoned master who shows us how Mozart might have written “Uptown Girl” and how his soldout, 10-year residency at Madison Square Garden opened up Billy’s beat to a generation ripe to discover him.
Bruce Springsteen, Paul McCartney, Pink, Sting and Nas cameo to tells us what’s great about Billy Joel. Who needs them? Just imagine Billy whistling the opening bars of “The Stranger” and you’ll have the answer. I reluctantly accept that a recently diagnosed brain disorder may break Billy’s stride, but what “And So It Goes” tells us is that the music will always be there when we ask the piano man to “sing us a song tonight.”