Showtime's 'The Go-Go's' Documentary Breaks The Seal

It's called The Go-Go's.

That's it. Just The Go-Go's. The new Showtime documentary about the first all-woman group to write their own songs, play their own instruments and snag a #1 hit doesn't come with a subtitle. That's notable because subtitles, in documentaries, often serve as thesis statements, organizing principles, saying, here is the throughline, the thematic infrastructure, of this film.

The organizing principle, the thematic infrastructure, of director Allison Ellwood's film The Go-Go's is ... The Go-Go's. No colon. Period, full stop.

Fittingly so, as it's as straightforward a music documentary as you're likely to come across. What it offers is a strictly chronological charting of the group's rise, reign and breakup, stopping at every last one of the familiar stations of the Behind The Music cross along the way: formation, youthful ambition, the shedding of early members for new members, discovery, the not-always-entirely-benign influence of managers and record executives, meteoric rise, partying, drugs, rehab, squabbles over money, breakup, reunion(s).