Tribeca 2025: The Year Music Took Over
Every June, Tribeca rolls into downtown like a film-nerd holiday parade. I’ve been going since De Niro and Rosenthal launched it in the aftermath of 9/11, back when lower Manhattan needed a shot of soul and optimism. And as a doc filmmaker who’s logged more hours in editing bays than I care to admit — and as someone who’s lived most of my life on New York concrete — I’ll say this with no hesitation: 2025 is the year music took over Tribeca.
Not quietly. Not politely. This year, the music docs are front and center — noisy, emotional, beautifully strange. And they’re not just about music. They’re about what music carries: identity, survival, grief, swagger, reinvention.
Billy Joel opens the festival with And So It Goes. It’s hard to imagine a more New York way to kick things off. Joel is ours — street-corner poetry in piano form. His songs are baked into this city’s DNA. Opening Tribeca with a doc about him isn’t just programming — it’s narrative alignment.
Miley Cyrus shows up with Something Beautiful, a visual album she directed herself. From what’s been teased, it’s part emotional scrapbook, part aesthetic experiment, part reclamation. Pop has always been performative, but Miley’s always made it personal — and this feels like her turning the camera fully inward.
Then there’s Billy Idol Should Be Dead — a title that doesn’t leave much room for subtlety. This is the high-octane, blood-and-eyeliner side of the slate. Idol’s always been a walking contradiction: punk edge and pop hooks, danger and resilience. If the doc gets even close to that energy, it’ll be a jolt.
But what really makes this year different is the range. The tonal stretch. The international scope. The unexpected entries that pull you in sideways.
Depeche Mode: M is one of them. Directed by Fernando FrÃas de la Parra, this isn’t just a tour doc. It’s set in Mexico City, shot during the band’s 2023 tour, but it sounds like something more reflective. A meditation on memory, aging, and what it means to carry decades of sonic weight through a city that pulses with its own ghosts. Depeche Mode has always dealt in shadows — this feels like a continuation, not a retrospective.
Boy George and Culture Club get the full biographical treatment, but with Ellwood at the helm, it’s not just a nostalgic rewind. Culture Club wasn’t just a band — it was a pop-cultural Molotov cocktail. Queer, colorful, impossible to categorize. And George? Still defiant, still iconic. The timing of this doc couldn’t be sharper, especially in a moment when drag, identity, and gender politics are once again being weaponized.
And then there’s Turnstile with Never Enough, which isn’t a doc in the traditional sense. It’s a visual album, a sequence of 14 videos with direction from inside the band. Guest appearances from Hayley Williams and Dev Hynes hint at a bigger creative ambition. Turnstile has been quietly remapping hardcore into something more joyful, more expansive. This could be their big visual swing.
The list keeps going: Wizkid. Metallica. Becky G. Eddie Vedder. A house music origin story. A Counting Crows deep dive. If it sounds like genre chaos — it is. That’s what makes it great.
These aren’t side projects. They’re stories with stakes. Stories about fame, yes, but also family, politics, identity, loss, and movement. And the music just makes it vibrate louder.
Tribeca came out of crisis. It was born to say: we’re still here, and we’re still making meaning. This year, it’s the music docs doing that heavy lifting. I’m in.