At least we immediately know who to blame for this mess. It's right there on the poster: "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart: a movie about Wilco by Sam Jones." Ah. So it was Sam Jones who made one of the most dishonest and boring movies about rock I've ever seen.

Who is Sam Jones? Well, he's a friend of the band, or more likely a desperate, Tweedy-worshipping hanger-on, which is obvious from the movie's idolatrous tone. He's also a photographer, which is obvious from the beautiful cityscapes of Chicago and the long, slo-mo shots of the band walking along the water on a grey day, dressed all in black. Much of the wide-angle photography in the film looks fantastic, and if Sam Jones ever makes an all-Chicago version of Koyaanisqatsi, I'll be there. But that's beside the point. There's a lot - a hell of a lot, in fact - that he does badly.

He doesn't realize, for instance, that presenting a challenging viewpoint doesn't necessarily equal being anti-Wilco. We all know the story of how the album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was dropped from its label, Reprise, and languished in limbo for long months before finally coming out on Nonesuch. We all know that the record execs wanted to change the album, and that they are therefore in the wrong, reneging at the last minute on the tacit "creative freedom" deal they had struck with the band before the recording started. And we all know that record execs are bozos. None of this needs to be explicitly pointed out. What we need is some discussion. We do get short interviews with Reprise executives who say vague and expected things about how the record just didn't hit them right, but what we get a metric ton of is Wilco-aggrandizing interviews with David Fricke (senior editor of the most corporate magazine in the universe, Rolling Stone, who has the nerve or the cluelessness to go off about evil executives with their "gold plated cell phones"), and with the band itself, and friends of the band, and even other, more complimentary record executives. This is all dry as hell, and goes on far too long. The movie doesn't seem edited for quality of content, just content. As long as someone is saying something nice about Wilco, it goes in.

Even the interviews with the intelligent and well-spoken Tweedy come off sounding like he's interviewing himself, as if it's all rehearsed. A friend is interviewing him, after all. There won't be any hard questions. He's free to talk about himself and his vision and his band as if it's the most important thing in the world, without an ounce of real introspection. This isn't Tweedy's fault, I don't think. Any rock star (egotistical creatures that they are) would jump at the chance at having a whole movie to talk about how great they are, and how put-upon they are. The fault is Jones's for letting him do it. In the act of trying to make Tweedy look good, he ends up making him look more self-involved and self-important than he is. I've heard Tweedy sound very self-effacing at times. Why isn't that in the movie? There's nothing even remotely revelatory about a rock star thinking he's great.