When it was introduced that this 12 months’s Tribeca Competition would open with the premiere of the HBO documentary “Billy Joel: And So It Goes,” I assumed, as a fan of Billy Joel and pop documentaries (which have a tendency towards the sunshine and hagiographic as of late), that we had been going to be in for a punchy, rousing, upbeat behind-the-music Tribeca appetizer. “And So It Goes” is unquestionably an infectious celebration of Joel’s pop magicianship — his indelible qualities as a composer and singer and rock star. And the movie did work properly as an appetizer, because the pageant solely confirmed Half 1 of what’s, in truth, a two-part HBO documentary.

However Half 1, which is 2 hours and 27 minutes lengthy, takes you proper up by 1980, when Joel has already launched his seventh album, “Glass Homes.” So I really feel assured in reviewing it as a stand-alone expertise. And what took me abruptly is the film’s emotional gravity. Directed by Susan Lacy and Jessica Levin, “And So It Goes” is just not a once-over-lightly, papering-over-the-dark-side portrait of a pop star. It consists of plenty of warts, however greater than that it reveals how Billy Joel’s sophisticated and never at all times joyful life fueled his incandescent and in some methods deceptively buoyant pop.

“Piano Man,” for example, emerged from the monetary disaster of Joel’s early days as a solo artist. To launch himself out of the scruffy demimonde of the Lengthy Island rock scene, he’d secured a contract with the one one thinking about signing him — Artie Ripp, proprietor of Household Productions (who’d gotten wind of Joel by Woodstock co-creator Michael Lang). It turned out to be a cope with the satan. Ripp produced Joel’s first album, “Chilly Spring Harbor” (1971), which led off with “She’s Received a Means” (fairly a primary solo observe), however to ensure that the songs match a radio format, Ripp mastered the album on the incorrect pace. Joel additionally obtained no cash. He moved to Los Angeles and, after drawing the curiosity of Columbia Data, determined to get out of his contract with Ripp by refusing to carry out as “Billy Joel.”

This resulted in his taking a gig for six months on the Government Room piano bar on Wilshire Boulevard, the place he carried out requirements, billing himself as “Invoice Martin” (full with exaggerated nightclub-singer voice). It was out of this tawdry eccentric chapter that he wrote “Piano Man,” and that’s why the tune is nice — since you hear the truth of Joel’s expertise, his commentary of the patrons and the entire piano-man-as-everyman vantage, echoed within the tune’s exultant melancholy. There’s a clip of a stadium viewers singing together with “Piano Man,” a sea of arms waving within the air, and it’s a type of moments the place you’re feeling how deeply that tune resonated in Center America. It made me assume again to a Billy Joel live performance from 1994, the place I noticed 50,000 folks on the Meadowlands Stadium in New Jersey be a part of collectively in singing, “A bottle of white! A bottle of crimson…” I discover “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” to be a grandiose tune, however that second was superior.

Because the documentary captures, Billy Joel arrived as a romantic pop star who was additionally a pugnacious fighter. You hear that duality in an astounding anecdote he relates about what occurred after the discharge of his fourth album, “Turnstiles,” in 1976. It was an okay however unsure file, with one tune (“New York State of Thoughts”) that might go on to grow to be a basic, however Joel’s profession was ambling alongside with out catching hearth. He’d assembled a band of Lengthy Island musicians who felt like brothers to him (kind of like his model of the E Avenue Band), however he knew he wanted a producer who may take him to the subsequent stage.

Joel worshipped the Beatles, and like all deep-dish Beatles fan he understood how instrumental the legendary producer George Martin was to their success. So Joel referred to as Martin and requested him to provide his subsequent album. Martin got here to a live performance to see Billy reside, and he was received over. He stated he’d produce the file, underneath one situation: Martin needed to ditch Billy’s band and use session musicians. It’s not as if this was an off-the-wall concept (session musicians had fueled the splendor of “Pet Sounds” in addition to Steely Dan’s albums), however Joel was having none of it. He informed Martin: Love me, love my band. And that was that.

Karma then smiled, as that follow-up file, “The Stranger” (1977), was produced by Phil Ramone, who stumble on a combination of lushness and spontaneity that matched, in its means, what Gus Dudgeon had been doing with Elton John. However when the executives at Columbia heard “The Stranger,” they didn’t assume there was one tune on it that certified as successful single.

“The Stranger” is a type of singular albums, like “Thriller” or “Rumors,” that turned out to be all hit singles. Each tune on it’s a timeless gem. However radio wanted to be satisfied, and right here’s the bizarre icing on the cake: Joel’s spouse, Elizabeth Weber, who was now his supervisor, insisted that “Simply the Means You Are” be launched because the second single (it’s the one that actually put the album over), and that was a tune that Joel, after he wrote it, didn’t even need on the file. He thought it was too “mushy.” He actually needed to be satisfied. That is the type of story that illuminates the thriller of pop.

As a historical past of Billy Joel’s rise to success, and of how his cavalcade of indelible songs got here to be, Half I of “And So It Goes” is richly satisfying fan service. However the place the documentary cuts deeper than that’s in its slow-burn, nearly novelistic portrait of Joel’s first marriage. The best way he and Elizabeth obtained collectively is out of some Led Zeppelin-haired counterculture model of John Updike: Weber was married to Joel’s bandmate and bosom buddy, Jon Small, when she and Billy fell in love. (She and Small had a son, who Billy finally adopted.) For some time, she deserted each males, which left Joel suicidal. He tried drugs and at one level drank a container of Lemon Pledge. However she and Billy reunited and stayed collectively for 10 years, throughout which she turned his muse and close-knit enterprise accomplice, inspiring a lot of his songs (notably “She’s Received a Means” and “She’s All the time a Lady”). They’d loving and tempestuous bond, and whereas it’s not as if the movie shares 1,000,000 scandals, co-directors Lacy and Levin catch the saga of the wedding by their delicate use of archival footage, letting us learn what’s taking place within the couple’s faces. In “And So It Goes,” these photos are value a thousand phrases.

Weber, with an elegant wedge of white hair, is interviewed all through the movie — as is Joel, who cooperated with the filmmakers by churning by his life with a refreshing candor. He grew up poor, as a delicate outsider (the one Jewish child, and the one child with divorced dad and mom, in his Lengthy Island neighborhood), and he by no means even dreamed about being a rock star on the extent he turned. However he had a glance to him, like a cuddly Sly Stallone, and there’s a means that that type of transformative stardom can’t not go to your head. (That, after all, is what “Huge Shot” is about.) The movie offers frankly with Joel’s addictions, and the way what saved him was most likely his obsession along with his songcraft.

“And So It Goes” pays tribute to how Joel fused the confessional vibe of the early-’70s singer-songwriter increase with the musical structure of Tin Pan Alley (Joel’s fellow bridge-and-tunneler Bruce Springsteen testifies that Joel’s songs are constructed just like the Rock of Gibraltar). However the movie makes too little a degree of 1 large forebear. Whereas Paul McCartney reveals up and pays tribute to Joel, saying that “Simply the Means You Are” is the tune he didn’t write that he would most prefer to have written, the reality is that Billy Joel’s genius for fusing a melodic line with a thought, making it sound like a musical sentence he made up on the spot, was profoundly influenced by McCartney. (John Cougar Mellencamp will get at this high quality of Joel’s, as does Nas.) I keep in mind how powerfully that side of his writing hit me once I was in a karaoke bar in Key West watching some frat-house dude mangle “I Go to Extremes.” His singing was terrible, but he invested the tune with a lot ardour that I noticed, for the primary time, what a transcendent tune it was. (From that day on, it’s been one in every of my all-time Joel favorites.)

I can’t render a definitive judgment on “Billy Joel: And So It Goes,” as a result of I haven’t seen Half 2. There are moments when Half 1 does develop a bit repetitive (I want the movie weren’t so doggedly chronological). But a day after I noticed it, it has stayed with me. Martin Scorsese made a four-hour documentary about one 12 months within the lifetime of Bob Dylan. Billy Joel isn’t Bob Dylan, however he’s a serious artist with a 55-year profession behind him, and I felt nourished by how this longform movie allows you to sit contained in the irresistibility of his music, and the mighty contradictions that fueled it.