There’s a particular electricity to the early ’90s that you can’t fake — that mix of restlessness, sincerity, and cigarette‑smudged ambition that lived in every club, every rehearsal space, every half‑finished song. Amy Scott’s documentary Counting Crows: Have You Seen Me Lately?, debuting on HBO on December 18, 2025, taps directly into that current. Instead of treating Counting Crows as a nostalgia artifact, Scott rewinds the tape to the moment when August and Everything After quietly detonated across a generation that didn’t yet know how much it needed a band willing to bleed in public. The film feels less like a retrospective and more like a portal — a way back into the rooms where everything first cracked open.
Scott’s greatest strength is her refusal to center the story solely on Adam Duritz, even though his gravity is impossible to ignore. She frames the band as a living organism: David Bryson’s grounding presence, Charlie Gillingham’s keys that always sounded like memory, Dan Vickrey’s sharp‑edged guitar lines, Matt Malley’s melodic bass, Ben Mize’s restless percussion, and the later additions who helped shape the band’s evolving emotional architecture. Gen X always valued the collective over the myth of the lone genius, and the documentary honors that ethos by showing how each member’s quirks and instincts fused into something fragile, volatile, and unmistakably theirs.
The sections on August and Everything After are the film’s emotional anchor. Scott doesn’t just recount the album’s creation — she drops you into the moment. You feel the uncertainty, the hunger, the sense that these songs weren’t written so much as unearthed. When the story shifts to Recovering the Satellites, the tone darkens in all the right ways. The band is bruised by sudden fame, overwhelmed by expectation, and wrestling with the pressure of following a debut that became a generational touchstone. Scott captures that shift without melodrama, letting the music — louder, jagged, more desperate — speak for the emotional fallout.
Crucially, this is not a talking‑head documentary. Yes, there are interviews, but they’re woven into a collage of archival footage, grainy club shows, studio scraps, and street‑level glimpses of a band trying to stay human while the world kept insisting they were something else. The editing has a mixtape rhythm — loose, intuitive, full of unexpected transitions that feel like memory rather than reportage. Watching it, you don’t feel like someone is telling you what happened. You feel like you were there, leaning against the wall of a tiny venue in 1993, watching a band figure out who they were in real time.
By the end, Counting Crows: Have You Seen Me Lately? becomes something more than a music doc. It’s a resurrection of a moment when vulnerability could still change the world. Scott doesn’t mythologize the past; she makes it feel close enough to touch. For Gen X viewers — and anyone who ever wore out a copy of August and Everything After — the film is a reminder that the music that held you together once can still do it now. And thanks to its HBO premiere, it’s finally accessible to anyone who wants to step back into that dimly lit, wide‑open moment when everything felt possible.
MPAA Rating: Unrated.
Runtime: 90 mins
Director: Amy Scott
Writer:
Cast: Counting Crows; Amy Scott; Adam Duritz
Genre: Documentary | Music
Tagline:
Memorable Movie Quote: "Who the fuck is Mr. Jones?"
Distributor: HBO
Official Site:
Release Date: December 18, 2025
DVD/Blu-ray Release Date:
Synopsis: After their debut album's success, Counting Crows and singer Adam Duritz became global rockstars. Through interviews and 90s footage, we see how they navigated sudden fame while staying true to their art.
