With a career spanning over three decades, Sonic Youth released 16 studio albums and countless singles and EPs. Their experimental sound, which blended noise, punk, and alternative rock, made them one of the most influential bands of their era. This documentary effectively argues that most hard rocking women (including the Runaways) have taken cues from Quatro.Sonic Youth is an American rock band that emerged in the early 1980s from the avant-garde scene of New York City. But the Detroit-born singer and bassist never hit it big in her home country.

Suzi Quatro's blend of early rock 'n' roll and glam made her a '70s superstar in Europe and Australia. It features great work by Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett, Dakota Fanning as singer Cherie Currie, and a ferocious Michael Shannon as sleazy self-imposed svengali Kim Fowley. Most musical biopics chart both highs and lows, but The Runaways, about the short-lived but influential all-girl rock band, is a catalog of horrors about being a young woman in show-biz. His cult grew even bigger following Jeff Feuerzeig's gripping 2005 bio-doc, which brings emotional context to Johnston's nakedly sincere lyrics. With his warbly voice and hand-drawn album art, the late Daniel Johnston developed a fanbase that included Kurt Cobain, Butthole Surfers and Sonic Youth. He never found fame during his short life and is admittedly still pretty obscure, so this film functions as much as a primer as a biopic. Streaming on TubiĪnother of director Ethan Hawke's portraits of underappreciated artists and their processes (see also: Seymour: An Introduction), this time dramatizing the final years of country musician Blaze Foley. This doc explores why it took so long for them to take off, and how they influenced everyone from KISS to R.E.M. Now they're canonized, but there was a time when power-pop pioneers Big Star were the sort of band that only your coolest friend's older brother knew about.

This doc finally gives Death its due, showing how they found their sound and accidentally prefigured the rise of punk. The Hackney brothers of the '70s band Death were anomalies in their hometown of Detroit: a trio of Black teenagers making fuzzy, furious hard rock in the birthplace of Motown. Often called the real life This Is Spinal Tap, this documentary follows the aging rockers on a disastrous European tour, and it's often as funny as any scripted comedy. In the headbanging '80s, Canadian hair metal band Anvil had the shredding stage antics that could have made them the next big thing.

Here are some cinematic deep cuts about unfairly overlooked artists you should consider streaming. But most remain relatively unknown, just like their subjects. Some of those films, like the Oscar-winning Searching for Sugar Man and 20 Feet from Stardom, give their central musicians an extra boost of notoriety. M ovies about beloved musicians are a dime a dozen, but sift through the earnest biopics and career-spanning documentaries and you'll discover a storied subgenre: movies about great musicians who deserve more credit than they get.

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