Metacritic reviews

Big Star was essentially Chris Bell's band, and emotionally, Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me is Bell's movie. Joining rock's dead-at-27 club via a 1978 car crash, he left behind a fine, then-unreleased album and two siblings who tell his story movingly. As they recount his final years, the sadness in Bell's songs comes to seem eerily prescient.

It’s a fascinating period in music and an equally fascinating story of promise, talent, expectations and failure. But you can’t help but feel that Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me won’t settle the most important argument of all to the unconverted — Were they as good as the hype?

A rock-doc that mythologizes the tragicomic flame out of power pop's seminal band, and the fan-made afterlife that brought them long-delayed success.

If Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me leads even one person to listen to Big Star for the first time, this movie will have done a great service.

A deserved tribute that puts us inside the music, and the head space, of a great, lost band.

Big Star may not be the best introduction for those who don't yet have at least some passing familiarity with the bruised-knee wistfulness of songs like "Thirteen," or the quavery undersea despair of "Kangaroo." But for anyone already curious, Nothing Can Hurt Me delivers the goods.

A skillfully rendered narrative that should satisfy fans and pique the interest of the uninitiated.

While we still recommend it to fans of the band, be warned that it might leave you wanting an encore.

Whether this love letter is more preaching to the converted than a corrective is arguable.

Big Star’s fans are so passionate that this film may well please some of them, but as for myself, I already knew their music was genius. By the end, I was muttering at every critic and musician and record producer, “Guys, tell me something I don’t know.”