The Day the Music Died: The Story of Don McLean's American Pie

Somehow, the more McLean explains the song, the more wondrous it seems.

Don McLean shares his ‘American Pie’ recipe in this thorough documentary.

McLean, who has frequently been portrayed as a prickly figure, and worse, puts on his most ingratiating mien here. And why not. Few musicians are given such generous opportunities to be docent to their legacies.

What the 90-odd-minute show clears up is that obscurity doesn’t equal profundity, and sometimes when “moss grows fat on a rolling stone” it’s because the songwriter thinks he’s gaining weight.

While filmmakers emphasize a storytelling universality for the song, it still seems locked in a specific era.

Although the song is repeated countless times across the doco, the viewer never tires of it.

Takes a maximalist approach to its exploration of McLean’s 1971 hit

The Day the Music Died: The Story of Don McLean's American Pie is something I felt compelled to search out even as I remained fairly guarded about what it had to offer.

The Day the Music Died feels most like something Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy might have written into the plot of A Mighty Wind.

At times, the documentary simply feels like a fan letter.