For Fans of Talking Heads

Jonathan Demme's 1984 film is not a concert document. It is a piece of performance art that happens to contain a concert. David Byrne walks out alone with a boombox playing a drum machine and builds the band member by member across the first four songs, so that by the time the full ensemble arrives playing 'Crosseyed and Painless,' you have watched something assembled from nothing. The big suit is not a gimmick. It is a formal argument about the relationship between the self and the performance of the self. Every shot earns its place. No backstage footage. No crowd cutaways. Just the stage and the bodies on it.

The jump from Fear of Music to Remain in Light is one of the most radical pivots in rock history. Byrne and Brian Eno had spent two years working on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which built songs from found samples and African rhythmic cells. They brought that vocabulary back to the band and replaced linear chord progressions with interlocking ostinato loops. The result is a record that sounds more like an engine than a song cycle. Every instrument is a rhythm instrument. Every rhythm is melodic. 'The Great Curve' and 'Seen and Not Seen' are as good as rock got in the 1980s.

Byrne directed and starred in this deadpan musical comedy set in a fictional Texas town celebrating its 150th anniversary. It is simultaneously a sincere love letter to American eccentricity and a gentle satire of it. John Goodman plays the loneliest man in town with complete earnestness. The music is lighter than the classic albums but the film has a warmth the band's records rarely allowed themselves. It also functions as an accidental documentary of mid-1980s Texas vernacular architecture and fashion.