All I can say is an intimate portrait of a rock star who died and had a lot more to say

Rock band Blind Melon emerged from the smog in Los Angeles in 1990 as an addition to the West Coast grunge scene that produced Nirvana in Pearl Jam. Their strong brand of blues, neo-psychedelic folk rock has gained a lot from the lyrics and vocal talents of Indiana-born frontman Shannon Hoon, whose fragile, silly, Neil Young-style fool led them to world fame with the 1993 single No Rain , which was the anthem. for the ordinary they would never exceed.

Hoon’s death from a cocaine overdose in October 1995, aged 28, came 18 months after Kurt Cobain‘s suicide that upset the band in the middle of the tour and triggered a temperamental Hoon self-destructive spiral; their second album, Soup, reached just 28 on the U.S. Billboard charts. In essence, they were discarded by the industry. And yet, for the grunge fans subdivision, there is a group of cult legends, Hoon, a hippie prophet with torn hair whose influence has been far too little recognized by the music press.

The documentary All I Can Say claims that Hoon is, oddly enough, one of its directors. The reason is simple: the vast majority was filmed by him, chosen from 250 hours of camera footage he turned against himself and his teammates between 1990 and 1995. This kind of video diary wasn’t specifically designed to capture the group’s rise to fame, but had a more private function: Hoon’s side is many moments of solitude, like brushing his teeth or simply hanging out with his dog at home. . He urinates often.

It takes us back to a few hours after his death as he unfolds during a phone call with his girlfriend Lisa in a hotel room in New Orleans: he mentions their daughter Nico and his fear of absence when she could say her word for the first time.

The other three deserving directors, Colleen Hennessy, Taryn Gould and Danny Clinch, managed to design impressively here. Hoon’s exit doesn’t have to impose violent meaning, as the portrait they build – with his complicity, in a strange way – brings us there. Their technique, which captures interference from Hi8 shots in moments of rupture and even the blueness of a blank tape, is cleverly impressionistic; storytelling takes place through all the ups and downs of the group.