A rock documentary with almost no music—and not a lick by the film’s subjects—Color Me Obsessed is the visual document the Replacements deserve. Brilliant one minute, awful the next, and doomed to fail, if their story can really be seen as a failure, the Minneapolis foursome is among the most mythologized bands of the last 30 years. As Goo Goo Dolls singer John Rzeznik says, “Fifty million claim to have seen the Replacements.” In their heyday, the group led by singer and songwriter Paul Westerberg was known mostly to the types of people who appear in Gorman Bechard’s film, an oral history told by critics, DJs, record store clerks, fellow musicians and, in one memorable scene, a dude who just happened to play pinball with guitarist Bob Stinson one night in a dive bar—while the rest of the band was onstage.

Recounting the group’s archetypal story—drunken punks build a local following, record a masterpiece (Let It Be), sign with a major label and fall to pieces—none of Bechard’s participants offer any groundbreaking new perspectives. “They’re the great existential heroes of American indie rock,” says Titus Andronicus leader Patrick Stickles, using big words to say pretty much what everyone else does. But it’s fun watching folks from all walks of life add strokes to the warts-and-all picture, and when Cheers star George Wendt suggests the song “Here Comes a Regular” was about his character Norm, you know these guys really were special. –Kenneth Partridge