Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Beastie Boys Story’ On Apple TV+, Where Michael Diamond And Adam Horovitz Recall The Group’s History In Front Of A Live Audience

In April 2019 at the Kings Theatre in Brooklyn, Michael Diamond (aka Mike D) and Adam Horovitz (aka Ad-Rock) staged Beastie Boys Story, a live documentary where the two of them recalled the Beastie Boys’ career, from how they met and how they got together with Adam Yauch (aka MCA) to form Beastie Boys in the early ’80s all the way to the last gig they did with Yauch before he died of cancer in 2012. Spike Jonze directed both the stage production, and the resulting documentary, clipped from the best parts of the 3 shows.

BEASTIE BOYS STORY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Most Beastie Boys fans know that the group, who lived in Manhattan and Brooklyn, were at first a hardcore punk band. And, as Mike D and Ad-Rock point out, they were called Beastie Boys despite the fact that Yauch’s definition of the acronym “BEASTIE” had the word “Boys” in it already, and that the drummer, Kate Schellenbach, was a girl. But they were teenagers and they loved hanging around the punk scene and making music, so it didn’t matter.

Diamond and Horovitz then go on, talking about their first days as a rap group, after they met an NYU student named Rick Rubin, who managed to get into business with rap impresario Russell Simmons and form Def Jam Records. They describe a meeting with Simmons where they saw Kurtis Blow learning to breakdance in the other room, which blew their minds. Through it all, they were just having fun hanging out and making music together, even through their first singles that started to be played in clubs.

Then Licensed To Ill came out in 1986, and things changed forever. The single “(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party)” was a massive hit, as was the album, and the trio leaned into the frat boy, beer-swilling images that they were actually making fun of in the song. They had a blast opening for Madonna and Run-DMC, as well as their first headlining tour. But they weren’t the beer-swilling party guys that blew up a big penis balloon on stage. They wanted to go away from that image, especially Yauch, but Simmons and Rubin wanted the party to continue.

That and Rubin’s takeover of the album’s production without the group’s knowledge not only almost caused the Beasties to break up, but it prompted their move to Capitol Records, where they released one of their best albums, 1989’s Paul’s Boutique, to — as one of the chapters of the story is called — “Crickets.” From there Horovitz and Diamond talk about the band’s continuing evolution, playing their own instruments on 1992’s Check Your Head, and how the death of their friend David Martin Scilken inspired the albums lyrics, as well as the pure joy they had making that album, 1994’s Ill Communication and 1998’s Hello Nasty.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: This is pretty much a music documentary paired with a live podcast episode. There really isn’t another movie that we’ve seen that has this exact format. Perhaps some one-person shows or concert films, but not exactly this format.

Performance Worth Watching: Even though Diamond and Horovitz are reading from a teleprompter, with passages adapted from their Beastie Boys Book that came out in 2018, they deliver those lines in a very natural manner, and have no problem going off on tangents when they find something funny, like how the burgers were made at their favorite burger shop when they were teenagers.

Memorable Dialogue: After Scilken. died, the Boys left their L.A. studio and went back to New York for his memorial. They thought that their old friends would resent them for turning into the “Fight For Your Right” guys. “It wasn’t like that with Kate and our old friends. We just sat around and missed our friend Dave. And it meant a lot more to the three of us than we realized. There was a reason we’d all been friends. And the whole trip was a connection to New York City. And it felt good to be with everybody again,” said Horovitz.

Sex and Skin: Surprisingly very little, even though their first tour was a pretty typical “sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll” kind of tour.

Our Take: For one reason or another, despite being big fans of the Beasties for the past 30 years, we weren’t completely clued in to the format of this show, or the movie that came out of it. What we were expecting was a lively form of the traditional music documentary, with talking heads, archival footage, and perhaps a celebrity narrator. But, just like the band has done for their entire career, Horovitz, Diamond and Jonze (who directed a number of their most famous music videos, like “Sabotage”) did something unexpected, and it made for a fun and heartwarming two hours.

If you’re aware of the group’s career over the past 40 years, not a ton of this information is new, and it definitely isn’t new if you read or heard the Beastie Boys Book. But hearing the two old friends banter on stage, and seeing Horovitz get emotional as he talked about their fallen friend Yauch, the band’s creative force, it just re-emphasizes why the Beastie Boys were not only so popular, but so influential, as well. Horovitz and Diamond are not trying to be their ’80s hip hop personas in this show; they’re being the middle-aged Jewish guys from New York that they are, looking back on the crazy path that they took and how they grabbed a hold of their destiny at just the right time.

But it was good to hear some more details about their falling out with Rubin and Simmons and their move to Capitol — part of it had to do with the fact that the Def Jam partners were withholding album income from the mutiplatinum-selling Licensed To Ill. It was also good to hear about the fact that Yauch briefly quit the band rather than keep doing what Def Jam wanted them to do. These details filled in pieces of the story that had gone missing in our minds over the decades.

The performance’s shaggy nature was refreshing and completely in character with the Beasties’ aesthetic — we heard Jonze occasionally over the PA as certain things got messed up, like where Diamond and Horovitz losing their place on the teleprompter, and various “CRAZY SHIT!” animations voiced by Bill Hader failed to play. During the closing credits more vintage footage played around some outtakes, including Steve Buscemi, Ben Stiller and David Cross calling Diamond and Horovitz out on their false humility about Paul’s Boutique, given how influential an album it’s become in the past 30 years.

And, while the documentary only plays a few of the Beasties’ songs in their entirety, knowing which are coming and hearing the intros and other verses sprinkled throughout brought us back to the time when they first came out. Even when Horovitz makes fun of the misogynistic lyrics of Girls, we heard the song in our heads. The entire presentation was thoroughly Beastie Boys, and we were very happy about that.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Beastie Boys Story is for anyone who was either a massive fan of the Beastie Boys or someone who just liked the hits. Through the words of Mike D and Ad-Rock, we get to relive a bit of what they did, and how they went from what seemed like an ’80s novelty act to one of the ’90s and ’00s most influential acts.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

Stream Beastie Boys Story On Apple TV+