The Black Keys' new documentary chronicles band's ascension to fame

The Black Keys’ drummer Patrick Carney sought authenticity when agreeing to take part in a documentary about the band.

In director Jeff Dupre, Carney and partner Dan Auerbach found a willing collaborator, and it shows in the documentary “This Is a Film About the Black Keys,” which chronicles the band’s ascension to the upper echelon of the music business from their beginning in Carney’s Akron basement to the duo moving to and working out of Nashville.

Emmy Award-winner Dupre didn’t want to limit his exploration of the band, who’ve been together for more than 20 years and will release their 11th album April 5, taking the audience on a journey through their career from touring in a minivan to playing in sold-out arenas.

The film premiered at SXSW last month and will screen at the Cleveland International Film Festival April 3. Dupre said he is still waiting for distribution as talks with streamers are ongoing.

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“When you make a film about someone, you spend a lot of time getting to know them, so I was intrigued by just their friendship and how that evolved over time,” Dupre said during a recent phone conversation. “I mean, to make music with someone the way they do is a pretty incredible way to communicate with someone. To have that kind of connection, to be able to walk into a studio and capture lightning in a bottle with someone, that kind of collaboration is kind of astonishing.”

It's a partnership that has led to multiple platinum albums, hit singles and sold-out tours − not to mention a couple of kids from Akron joining the ranks of rock royalty. But it’s not sugarcoated in the least. Dupre assembles some impressive footage, even from those early minivan moments, along with plenty of footage he shot.

Through it all, the overall openness of Auerbach and Carney comes through, with an irony being that at some points in their friendship, they were not particularly good at communicating with one another.

“It's very intense what they do to be in a band. It's super high pressure. There's always pressure to outdo yourself. There's always pressure to make the next album way better than the last one, and the cycle of recording and then going out and touring, it was just brutal,” Dupre said. “So it makes sense that at some point that they would need to take a break. I think that for them, they wish they had taken more breaks.”

Dupre can laugh about the communication breakdown.

“They communicate well enough that the first thing they told me was that they had communication issues,” he joked.

The Black Keys started to gain mass appeal with the release of “Brothers” in 2010 which yielded memorable tunes in “Tighten Up” and “Howlin’ For You,” but it was with the release of the follow-up “El Camino” (2011) that things took off, bringing the pressure that Dupre mentioned.

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Success is its own reward, and it also exerts its own demands. That certainly happened with the band, and it's something Dupre explores in the film.

“I mean, some of it was very hard to look at, especially there's some footage just from...,” Carney said, searching for the words during a recent phone interview. “I'm just instantly taken back to how incredibly high pressure some of our circumstances were and how stressed out I was, not necessarily needed to be. But a lot of the stuff, it's very cool to see, especially the stuff from while ‘El Camino’ is really blowing up, and then to go back even further and see us video from the tour van and all kinds of stuff like that.”

“They say that their relationship has never been better, and I think that's a hard-won place that they've arrived at,” Dupre said. “But I do think they have some perspective on where they've come from and where they're going. And I think they feel like they know better now and they're going to work a bit smarter and not kill themselves all the time. And I think they know who each other is more than they did.”

Auerbach and Carney’s communication has seemingly evolved over the years to the point that by the end of the documentary, it’s not difficult see they’ve grown to resemble that married couple who’ve been married for decades yet still have passion for their relationship.

George M. Thomas dabbles in film, television and, apparently, music for the Beacon Journal.

This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: 'This is a Film About The Black Keys' documentary stars Akron band