When You're Strange

With lots of rarely seen archive footage, captures the rise and fall of The Doors, the band that in its short existence gave a face to a generation. With a singer who had never sung, a guitarist who had only been playing for six months, and a composer who made it to number one with the first song he ever wrote, an instant legend was born. The song in question was "Light My Fire," the composer Robby Krieger. The singer was demigod Jim Morrison, the charismatic front man who died at age 27 in a bathtub in Paris. Narrated by Johnny Depp, the documentary includes footage of a drunken and tripping Morrison who made a habit of appearing in such a state in the studio and onstage, to the great annoyance of the other band members. Most of this footage was shot by Paul Ferrara, a friend of Morrison from the UCLA Film School, and it is interspersed with news excerpts that capture the era in which the band was performing: the war in Vietnam, Woodstock, and student protests. Despite the fact that The Doors only lasted from 1965 to 1971, they still sell more than a million CDs each year.