Billy Joel Went to Extremes. A New Five-Hour Doc Shows How and Why

Over the course of its two parts and five hours, Billy Joel: And So It Goes recruits many of the title legend’s musician pals, from Bruce Springsteen and Sting to, surprisingly, Nas, who speaks to the way “Piano Man” still resonates. They all testify to Joel’s songwriting chops, his everydude way with a lyric, or the times he’s bristled, to say the least, at bad reviews. But it takes one of Joel’s non-music friends, Howard Stern, to pinpoint what makes the documentary, debuting this weekend on HBO, more engrossing than anyone may have expected. As Stern says, Joel’s story is “way deeper psychologically than Billy wants to know.”

From the start, you can practically feel directors Susan Lacy and Jessica Levin wanting their well-crafted film to focus on Joel’s music and career. And why not? It’s been a pretty remarkable one: An often-bullied Long Island kid haunted by feelings of abandonment finally, after several false starts, becomes an arena-packing pop star, thanks to songs whose old-school pop classicism didn’t always feel in step with the rock & roll times. Along the way he marries a supermodel, becomes one of the few Seventies pop stars embraced by MTV, writes enough enduring hits to pack a future jukebox musical, and lands in his current role as the boomer Sinatra also taken to heart by millennials and Gen Z.

But throughout And So It Goes, Joel’s personality — stubborn, pugnacious, at times self-destructive — keeps barging into the narrative, threatening to derail his career, his personal life or both. Joel’s dark side isn’t news; in the quippy words of a newspaper headline on one of the many traffic accidents that plagued him earlier this century, “Joel Produces Another Smash Hit.” (Give that editor a belated raise.)

But that period of drinking and self-immolating impulses was hardly the first such moment in his life, and this portrait aims to dig deep into his psyche and probe what’s haunted and dogged Joel since childhood. For all its infomercial moments, including a few too many testimonials and scenes of cheering fans in concert halls, And So It Goes also has moments of startling candor rare for the current state of authorized music docs. By the end, you’re amazed not just that songs like “Vienna” have impacted on a new generation, but that Joel managed to survive all the times he drove himself into a ditch (literally and physically) and left many bodies — spouses, band members, loyal producers — in his wake. The film is as much a study of Joel’s conflicted brain as the creation of his albums, and it’s richer for it.

For those who know the basics of Joel’s story, And So It Goes sticks with a fairly predictable narrative. We see him as a young man with floppy bangs playing organ in the Long Island garage band the Hassles, forming the proto-Spinal Tap heavy-music duo Attila, and coping with a first solo album (Cold Spring Harbor) botched in its completion, after which he’s saddled with problematic business contracts. Once again we hear how he relocates to L.A. and takes a gig in a lounge to make money and hide out, resulting in, yes, his breakthrough song “Piano Man.” We see how The Stranger finally transformed him into the boisterous palooka of pop, how he met and married seeming polar opposite Christie Brinkley, achieved a second wind with 1989’s Storm Front, made the decision to stop writing songs, and crashed so many vehicles that he literally became a Saturday Night Live sketch.

But we also learn about the distant father whom Joel didn’t see for decades, their awkward reunion, and the way that situation inspired “Vienna”; his single mother’s battles with drinking and depression; and the backstory of his Jewish grandparents, who owned a clothing factory next door to the sight of the Nazi Party rallies in Nuremberg, Germany, and were very nearly sent to a concentration camp. Joel’s pre-fame suicide attempts have been documented before, but their inclusion here indicates the first suggestion of the darkness that would overtake him in the future. Joel’s first wife and later manager, Elizabeth Weber, also makes a rare public appearance, and she comes across as someone who was both tough on him and his band but also played a major role in salvaging his career (not to mention rescuing him from his Bad Billy side). In his role as a cooperating witness on his life, Joel, now looking like the weathered Long Island sailor he inhabited in “The Downeaster ‘Alexa,’” recounts or corroborates these stories with a blend of straightforwardness, melancholy and defiance. (“I never had a DWI, so fuck you,” he says in response to reports of his accidents.)

Naturally, the songs and albums that once flowed so effortlessly out of him are showcased aplenty. And as tired as one may be of hearing “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song),” “The Longest Time,” “Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway), “She’s Got a Way,” and so many others for roughly the 7,879th time, it’s easy to hear why they, or more obscure gems like “Famous Last Words” or “Say Goodbye to Hollywood,” have held up so well. In an era when singer-songwriter craft can often amount to lackadaisical strumming over threadbare melodies, Joel’s songs feel like some of the last that may be covered 50 years from now. (As proven by snippets of oversung versions of “New York State of Mind,” he’s still still the best interpreter of that song, though.) Even when the songs remain churlish — “Big Shot” or “You May Be Right,” to name just two — it’s nonetheless entertaining to hear the real-life stories that inspired them. Yes, Joel really did ride his “motorcycle in the rain” in the latter, and Weber, who recounts the story, was not remotely amused, nor by the subsequent motorcycle accident that almost killed him.

That tale is just one of many in the story that don’t show Joel in an especially flattering light. “I had a chip on my shoulder,” Joel admits at one point, and it’s remarkable he could still stand up given how many chips he was balancing. From the moment he ditches his high school band to join the Hassles after they offer him a Hammond B3 organ, Joel doesn’t seem to hesitate when it comes to pursuing his music or career no matter the fallout. After finally achieving a breakthrough with the Piano Man album, Joel released a prickly followup single, “The Entertainer,” that took shots at the record company people who helped make “Piano Man” a hit by trimming it down for radio. In one of several instances in which she grows visibly choked up over problems with their marriage, Brinkley recounts how Joel initially sided with his manager and ex-brother in law after she began suspecting that her husband was being ripped off. “He trusted him more than he trusted me, which hurt,” she manages to get out.

The rise and dissolution of the Joel-Brinkley marriage takes up a substantial chunk of the documentary’s second half. Watching them descend from the smitten twosome in home movies and the “Uptown Girl” video to a couple torn apart due to his on-the-road (and off-the-road) carousing makes for downright depressing viewing. Recounting their eventual divorce, Brinkley says, “He didn’t realize how much he could hurt people” when he was drinking. Then again, Joel also waylaid band members (like drummer Liberty DeVitto, still somewhat embittered about the way he was cast aside during the making of River of Dreams) and loyal producer, Phil Ramone, after deciding to move on from them later in his life.

To their credit, Lacy and Levin don’t sugarcoat any of this or the ways Joel flirted with disaster as his lifestyle got out of control. We see a bit of that SNL skit and plenty of those car-wreck headlines. His feud with Elton John, after John criticized his occasional touring partner in Rolling Stone, is recounted, as is Joel’s rehab stint, the breakup of his third marriage (to chef and TV hostess Katie Lee), and his subsequent tumbling off the wagon yet again. Given his innate talent for churning out melodies, which rivals that of Elton John’s and Paul McCartney’s, Joel’s decision to put a halt to writing pop songs remains baffling after more than 30 years. “I was freed of the tyranny of the rhyme,” he says, seated per usual at a piano. As others venture to guess, maybe he didn’t want his later songs to be unfavorably compared to his crowd-pleasers. But now that so many of his peers continue to turn out new material into their eighties, Joel’s choice is even more striking. Was it another, perhaps subconscious way of undermining his career? Maybe not, but the doc makes you wonder.

And So It Goes ends with a newly remarried Joel, enjoying he and fourth wife Alexis Roderick’s two young children and admitting he’s still trying to understand life and himself. (Cue footage of tree-encased home and estate, in contrast to earlier clips of desolate beaches that signaled isolation and depression.) For all his foibles, his reputation as the “brat” of pop music, as one critic put it, Joel remains strangely endearing, almost lovable, by the time the final credits roll. Unlike most of the rock-vet pals who weigh in on his saga, he truly does seem like someone you’d want to share a beverage with — even if you worry he’ll purposefully pour it onto your lap if you say the wrong thing.