Stop Making Sense

Talking Heads build a concert from an empty stage

David Byrne walks on alone with a boombox and an acoustic guitar, and the concert has already begun. Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense is not a rock documentary in the usual sense. Shot over several nights in December 1983 at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood, and released in autumn 1984, it almost never cuts to the crowd, almost never pauses for an interview, and never digs into childhoods or band feuds. The story is the stage filling up, musician by musician, song by song, until a new wave band has become a nine-person funk machine in front of you.

Tina Weymouth arrives, then Chris Frantz, then Jerry Harrison. Each entrance changes the size of the music without changing the song underneath. Psycho Killer starts as a nervous solo. By the time Bernie Worrell, Alex Weir, Steve Scales, Lynn Mabry and Ednah Holt are in place, the four art-school players have become a party that still keeps a clear structure. Byrne designed the plain screens and the lighting cues. Jordan Cronenweth, who had photographed Blade Runner, keeps the cameras steady enough that the dancing can stay strange on its own. Demme does not use a crash zoom to prove the night is working. He stays with the players and the songs.

The set is drawn from the Speaking in Tongues tour, but the film treats the hits as steps in a build, not as trophies. Once in a Lifetime, Burning Down the House, This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody), Life During Wartime: each one adds another part, and the set does not slow down. The oversized suit Byrne wears for Girlfriend Is Better is both a joke and a point about frontmen. The suit turns him into a cartoon of a frontman, and he looks more ordinary inside it. The Tom Tom Club stretch lets Weymouth and Frantz take the mic on their own songs. Demme never cuts away to a fan crying on cue. The feeling sits in the rhythm and in the way the set is built.