Oh brother: "Don't Look Back in Anger"

So it goes. Blur reunite, successfully, and document the occasion with not one but three separate documentaries. Oasis do likewise, no less successfully, and go as far as to hire the directors of Blur's first and best comeback movie (Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern, late of 2010's No Distance Left To Run) to put them up on the big screen. Is nothing the Gallaghers do original? Don't Look Back in Anger opens with a "previously on Oasis" potted history: the supersonic - nay, stratospheric - launch and success, the tabloid feeding frenzy, the wibbling rivalry, the thousand-yard glares and stares, the bust-ups, "The Hindu Times", the semi-inevitable split (announced on stage in Paris by a heroic fonctionnaire who advises the jeering fans to log onto oasis.com to find out more), the far less potent solo projects (yielding literally one good song over sixteen years), the years of stubbornness, the will-they-won't-they, the rising plumes of nostalgia stoked by such docs as 2016's Supersonic and 2019's Liam Gallagher: As It Was and the scenes after every recent England football victory. It was, after all, the songs that persisted. Scrappy, patchwork beerhall and terrace anthems, really no more lyrically meaningful than, say, Andrew WK's "Party Hard", their very porousness proved a virtue, and indeed Oasis's saving grace: these circuits were only fully completed once The People™ started to sing or howl along with them, their integral retroness allowing everybody to reconnect with some half-forgotten, perhaps even non-existent heyday. She's electric. He's electric. Together, we are only more electric. At some point in the long and drawn-out reunion process, that's what Noel and Liam - two individuals famously not given to reflection - began to realise themselves. And gradually, unexpectedly, Lovelace and Southern's film itself becomes electric, too.

It takes a while, granted, and there are stretches where the emotional current flows brighter and more freely than it does elsewhere. At its strongest - and as with No Distance Left to Run before it - DLBIA functions as an event-cinema study in modern British masculinity, swapping in bluff Manc lads for effete Essex art-schoolers. When Liam finally shows up at the rehearsal rooms, it's as a parka-contained cloud of displaced grievances, refusing to address his brother directly, getting in a huff with some innocent drum baffles, tearing the plastic cap off one of those woke water bottles they have nowadays. We knew things were bad; Lovelace and Southern show us how bad things could be when one brother or another had a right cob on. For a while here, it's touch-and-go, strictly business: this first day of rehearsals as the Oasis of old ends with Liam swaggering out of the room before his bandmates can even bring "Champagne Supernova" to an end, Noel offering an older brother's sage nod that seems to say "let him go". The techies look on nervily. How can this possibly work over the course of one gig, let alone a whole world tour? It's the songs, of course. It was always the songs. On the soundtrack, one unidentified Gallagher - probably Liam, but as with most siblings, their voices tend to merge - insists he's sworn off the drink because the songs demand that level of respect. (We don't hear "The Hindu Times".) Suddenly, Noel and Liam are recast as an estranged couple having to put their interpersonal differences aside for the benefit of their offspring, in this case their musical legacy. And as the tour plays out, that wibbling rivalry is transformed into a sibling synergy that falls somewhere between magical and miraculous: now they're on the same stage and the same page - and it doesn't seem quite so absurd when the directors cut in a Manchester priest's sermon about Jesus telling Peter to forgive his brother. They may not be Biblical, but one can draw lessons from these events.

Inevitably, some of the old familiar hubris remains in place. We hear Liam opining that Oasis's splitting was responsible for the world going to hell in a handcart, as Lovelace and Southern lay on a montage encompassing Brexit, Trump, Johnson, Musk and Covid. (I don't think Oasis splitting was responsible for any of that. Though the older, wiser Noel is heard maintaining Oasis is "not some right-wing thing", I do suspect some of the group's fans might be.) And the film isn't blind to the hyperbole and hoopla that accompanied these gigs: one attendee, a middle-aged man in (not inaptly) a Beatles tee, insists the comeback is on a par with the resurrection of Christ. What's interesting about DLBIA - what makes this by far the strongest Oasis film yet - is that there are stretches where we can't be sure Lovelace and Southern are the biggest Oasis fans, and their ambivalence allows them to take a step back and a good look around; they're not entirely swept up and swept along by proceedings, until the point where they (and we) are. In the meantime, they couldn't help but spot what these gigs meant to the fans, captured in an elevated form of concert-movie portraiture, crying, praying, hugging and - yes - singing. What's more surprising is what these concerts clearly meant to the band: hitherto never the most emotionally expressive individual - unless that emotion was "peeved" - Noel is caught fiddling anxiously around backstage before the first Cardiff gig ("we've got a chance here to fix the narrative"); he appears, by his own admission, in something of a trance as the gig itself plays out; he looks visibly relieved at how well it all went afterwards; and is finally observed with tears in his eyes as he sets about the title song with a new, middle-aged mellowness. There is, after all, so much to look back on, for better and worse.

The concert footage, which starts to dominate from around the halfway mark, will obviously depend on personal tolerance for, say, Liam's gravel-gargling vocal on "Roll With It"; there's still only so much Lovelace and Southern can finesse. And in the second half, you can feel these directors - possibly egged on by writer-producer Steven Knight, who takes a bizarre "created by" credit - giving in and giving the fans what they may ultimately want, even if that's something those fans will likely have already experienced. The extended fan portraits - here a Korean oyster diver who hums "Acquiesce" to herself underwater, there a Brazilian who named her dog after Bonehead - prove far less compelling than whatever was going on in those rehearsal rooms and backstage on this tour; I'll give the directors credit for going international with these segments - it's not all tubby middle-aged men in bucket hats - but they leave DLBIA as a concert film with a terrific opening act, a rousing finale, and some bland filler in between. Still, the plain truth is these shows did fix the pop-cultural narrative, while simultaneously repairing something fundamental to the brothers' relationship. What that middle stretch quietly flags is that nobody in their right mind would pay this much to see Noel performing "Wonderwall" solo (you'd be better off catching Mike Flowers for nowt at the local village fete), but put him on guitar and stick Liam upfront, and you've got something. With newfound humility and self-awareness, they realised they needed one another, too - or at the very least to see one another anew through the eyes of their adoring (and forgiving) crowds. Maybe it's inevitable that the foremost Beatles copyists of our time should have arrived at their own Get Back - but this Get Back wonders what it's like when a band gets back together, and then take whatever message they're carrying to the masses once more. The dates have just been announced for Oasis Live '27, with tickets retailing in the vicinity of £150-200. They will almost certainly sell out within minutes. So it goes.

Don't Look Back in Anger is now playing in cinemas nationwide.