“The Best Summer” is titled after the phrase people often use when reminiscing about a specific summer with fondness. We’ve all used it at some point, even if only in thought. Some memories of summer are more vivid than others, like pulling out archives of nostalgia. That’s literally what director Tamra Davis did when she discovered a box of videotapes she had shot back in 1995 and 1996 at a little-known Australian indie music festival called Summersault, while evacuating her home during the January 2025 Palisades fire in California.

But why did Davis, a director known for helming 90s comedies that became cult classics (like Chris Rock’s 1993 “CB4” and Adam Sandler’s 1995 “Billy Madison”), have these tapes?

At the time, she had just married Beastie Boys drummer Michael Diamond (aka Mike D) as the tour began. The lineup of the tour consisted of the following artists: Sonic Youth, Beastie Boys, Foo Fighters, Pavement, Rancid, Beck, Bikini Kill, Kim Deal’s the Amps, and other influential 1990s alternative artists.

Her goal was simply to make a tour diary, something she would give to the musicians later on as a memento. Davis’s approach was a DIY-style use of Sony Hi8 camcorders during Australia’s summer (hence the title of the Lollapalooza-esque festival) in December 1995 and January 1996. After the festival Down Under, the Beastie Boys, Sonic Youth, and Foo Fighters then played dates in Southeast Asia, which MTV International promoted to tout its newly launched TV channels in the region. Davis has footage from those dates as well, but none of these tapes had been unearthed until she discovered them in a box while evacuating her Malibu home.

By incorporating the footage into a full-length documentary without any current talking-head clips, “The Best Summer” becomes an immersive time capsule for viewers. Davis’s close proximity to musicians and others involved in the tour gives the documentary both a front-row and a backstage pass to the tour’s activities.

As she interviews the musicians, Davis is often accompanied by Bikini Kill leader Kathleen Hanna, who helps her conduct pre-and-post show interviews, often using the same questions. In between concert footage, we see interviews with Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, Dave Grohl and Pat Smear of Foo Fighters, and Adam Yauch, Adam Horovitz, and Diamond of the Beastie Boys. The audio and video quality of the footage isn’t pristine, which matches the raw essence of the music from these bands, who were arguably in their prime back then. That said, Grohl and Beck look like babies, but it’s still cool to see the live footage and these rare on-the-spot interviews, where the subjects are quite relaxed and comfortable. While none of the live footage was touched up, some of the interviews were cleaned up using modern audio tools, which makes sense.

Viewers like me who were closely following these bands at the time will get the most out of “The Best Summer”. That said, the documentary still has value for those born in 1995 or later. It’s one thing to hear from someone who was at all these great shows, waxing nostalgic about their concert-going halcyon days; it’s another altogether to actually see what they experienced.

It’s almost otherworldly to see a massive concert crowd without a smartphone in sight, but that’s the benefit of a time before the internet took over, and the MP3 audio format changed the music business. You can bet that tickets to these shows were at least 50% cheaper than they would be now. It was also much more affordable for bands to go out on tour 30 years ago.

One can’t help but think about what else has changed since 1995/1996. Some of these bands broke up (alas, Sonic Youth), some musicians have formed other bands, and others have died. This is why the Beastie Boys’ live performance footage stands out, after Adam Yauch died of cancer in 2012 at age 47. Seeing the trio’s electrifying mix of hip-hop and hard rock during this time is a gift, and it makes their backstage closeness even more bittersweet.

I couldn’t help but think how interesting it would be to see Grohl, Gordon, Stephen Malkmus (Pavement), and the like reflect on this footage within the documentary, but that’s not what “The Best Summer” is about. After all, it says it all in the title.

RATING: ***