The fluctuation of Hollywood’s vogue is a topic I suspect few could successfully pin down or delineate precisely. In my own lifetime, there was, a decade or so ago, a fun, family comedy era—think Grown Ups or Just Go with It (I live for any and all of these). There was, just a few years ago, a multiverse-oriented movies era—Spiderman: No Way Home or Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Now, it seems, a new movie era is upon us, one called “The Biopic About A Famous Music Artist From Like 50 Years Ago Era.” The brilliant 2022 Elvis, the hugely successful A Complete Unknown from earlier this year, and soon, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, featuring the renowned Jeremy Allen White.

Well, though with the tiny caveat that it’s a documentary and not a biopic, Billy Joel: And So It Goes, released on HBO Max not long ago, fits squarely into this current movie era, and it does so rather tremendously.

Now, for context: I am a huge Billy Joel fan. As someone who (legitimately, I might add, and not at all performatively) loves music of all kinds and will listen to most any genre, I consider him one of my favorite artists of all time. So, I’m sure you could imagine my reaction when, contorted beyond most measures of politeness on the couch and lazily munching on a snack, I was suddenly assailed by an ad for the new documentary by my TV.

Well, a couple days ago, I finally got around to watching it. The movie is broken down into a two-part series, each installment approximately two-and-a-half hours long. Long story, short: it is all pretty fantastic. But, as this is after all a movie review and not my extensive collection of private Apple Notes, let’s break it all down, bit-by-bit.

Let’s start with this: it isn’t just the usual, old documentary. Or, no—in a way, it is, but with the kind of musical twist that someone like me finds absolutely brilliant. Clips of Joel’s old 80’s concerts. Interviews with Springsteen or McCartney. Joel today, at seventy-six, casually handling his home piano with the indescribably mystical deftness of Michelangelo molding his David.

Simultaneously, a really cool feature of the doc is the weaving between the past and present day. Rather than feeling like some archivist’s compilation of all their favorite clips of the past, the film feels much more like an ongoing story being told by Joel today about the past. And, having never been to a Joel concert before, it was so cool to finally see the artist’s personality on full display, without any of that superficial celebrity PR-trained nonsense which sullies so many of his peers.

However, by far the most impressive, exceptional thing about the film for me is its truly masterful storytelling. Overall, it is organized in a largely historically chronological order of events, with brief recesses during which other parts of Joel’s persona, such as, for instance, his grandparents’ escape from the Nazis, is recounted.

Besides these moments, though, the doc paints a vivid picture of Joel’s story with remarkable attention to detail. Did you know that “New York State of Mind” was written in under an hour on a bus trip back to the city? Or, that Joel turned George Martin (yes, that George Martin!) out of loyalty to his touring band?

To be totally fair, the movie isn’t wholly spotless. Personally, my biggest annoyance came, surprisingly, at the very end of the film, when, after actually quite evocatively portraying the artist’s life’s gradual negative spiral around 2010 or so, the doc turned black, jumped straight to the present day for about five minutes, and promptly ended. It was frankly pretty underwhelming and irritating to say the least, and whether this happened because the filmmakers ran out of runtime or money or I don’t know what else, it definitely soured my opinion on the project some.

Nevertheless, for the most part, the doc is certainly a success. I’ll admit: for watchers that aren’t really big music people, the movie might end up being a bit of a bust. Still, for anyone else, it is worth watching, for sure. It’s a rare chance to hear Joel’s story straight from the man, myth, and legend himself—the Piano Man, still hitting all the right notes.