The heart of Runnin’ Down A Dream: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, directed by Peter Bogdanovich, is clear enough—the enduring power in the Heartbreakers’ 30-some-odd-year career is rooted in the classic ideal of band-ness.
Bill Flanagan, MTV exec and author, remembers hearing Petty say that it’s always been important to him that the Heartbreakers remained a real band with real personal, musical, emotional interaction. “They can never become what some bands become,” Flanagan says, “just a brand name with a bunch of hired guns.”
The truth in that theory is easily apparent. In the documentary, a stringy, wiry young Petty links up with longtime guitarist Mike Campbell and piano player Benmont Tench. Then, decades later, the three of them are on stage, shivering with the same brand of fire, having climbed from a Gainesville, Florida farm to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
The band couldn’t have existed without Campbell and Tench, Petty tells the camera: “We are all one.”
The oneness that that band achieved―within a staggeringly hit-stocked discography of tried-and-true rock and roll, based on simple rock constructs but shot through with exceptional clarity, feverish hooks, and front-to-back instrumental personality―is almost easy to forget, as ingrained in U.S. pop culture as it’s become.
But Bogdanovich’s film is a thorough and deftly rendered reminder, a glorious time capsule of the creation of some of American rock’s finest songs, and a warts-and-all portrayal of the glory and crushing difficulty inherent in real band-ness.
The glory certainly makes Petty and the Heartbreakers’ story thrilling, as you watch their baby band graduate to a record deal, to early British hype, to worldwide hero status. Those early days are stunning, Campbell teasing his Les Paul Goldtop through the recording of “Breakdown,” Tench’s fingers flitting, drummer Stan Lynch howling those high harmonies. It’s as big a thrill to see Petty repeatedly take on the music business and win as it is to witness the Heartbreakers heed Bob Dylan’s direction as his backing band in ’86 and ’87.
But it’s the points where the Heartbreakers’ oneness breaks that make Runnin’ Down a Dream real. You’ll tense when Petty excludes band mates toward the Full Moon Fever period in the late ’80s, and when Lynch’s pride chafes his bandleader and he’s eventually given his walking papers. You’ll fret while longtime bassist Howie Epstein turns pale and thin from drug abuse; you’ll ache when he’s lost to it.
An awful lot of cheers and tears run through Runnin’, between the time when the young Heartbreakers decide on their Flying V-pierced heart logo and when a 50-something Petty slings his Firebird over his head at a Gainesville, Florida concert and waves to a sea of cheering fans.
But the enduring idea in this moving documentary might be captured best by producer Rick Rubin, who certainly knows a thing or three about music, and about Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. “It’s like a lost art what they do,” he says. “Great players, great band interaction, great songwriting.”