I almost didn’t watch this because I lowkey hated Jim Morrison after seeing Oliver Stone’s movie. But wow, this was a really solid documentary that cleared up a lot of points. It made me realize exactly why I didn’t like Oliver Stone’s.

The boldest gamble on the part of this doc is that it seems to be made of entirely archival footage. There’s nobody injecting opinions, no recent interviews or contemporary context to break us out of the period. This doc is solidly planted in 1968-1971 and that’s all you get. It sometimes cuts away from the Doors to show us news clips and headlines of other related events at the time: MLK’s & RFK’s assassinations, Kent State, Vietnam, Hendrix’s death, etc, all archival footage so it fits seamlessly in place without any clunky explanations. But I think the best part was (unglamorous as it was) seeing footage of Morrison stumbling around, drunk, high and tripping while the band did their best to keep him together. It also dug deep into the Florida obscenity trial where Morrison got totally railroaded by the conservative morality police, and rather than act like an indignant rebel as Stone portrayed, he was really humbled and shocked back down to earth by realizing he wasn’t invincible.

This is a huuge departure from Oliver Stone’s glamorous portrayal of Morrison as some sort of spiritual shaman (inhabited by the souls of Native American chiefs no less) whose drug use expanded his genius. No, this doc shows how much the band realized Jim was self destructing and tried to get him clean—which Jim struggled to do but kept relapsing. This is the human portrayal that makes Morrison so much more sympathetic and even more tragic because he was trying to pull himself together. Oliver Stone chose to portray him as some sort of deity with a deathwish, which actually just made him seem like a jerk.

So to anyone else out there who saw Stone’s Doors movie and hated the character of Jim Morrison, I recommend checking this out. It won’t make you love him, but at least you’ll see him as more of a human being rather than a sanitized Hollywood attempt at Greek tragedy.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMMo3EmIfJw