overview

The late-'60s avant garde rock band CAN gets a feature-length tribute with this affectionate documentary chronicling its odd inception and subsequent career. In CAN -- The Documentary, the remaining band members are interviewed amidst culled together archival footage from talk shows, concerts, and television appearances to paint a portrait of a band who always remained happily on the sidelines of mass appeal, mixing street music, jazz, folk, and rock into a sometimes poppy, sometimes abstract stew. The band's influence on such seminal acts as Sonic Youth and Talking Heads is also analyzed.