I remember listening to Rodney Bingenheimer's radio show on KROQ when I was in high school. I knew nothing of him at the time and only know what I know now because of what I learned from this movie, but regardless of how popular Rodney became with the rock stars and celebrities and regardless of how well his show ever did, the guy just does not have a voice for radio. I think that in his case it is vital that you know him personally or that you know about his history in the music business, because listening to him as a radio talk show host is intolerably boring. It is not a surprise, to say the least, that his radio show never strayed far from the midnight to 3am shift on Sundays, although I would rather listen to him than Jed the Fish any day of the week. Jed the Fish irritates the hell out of me.

Speaking of which, one of the more interesting things that I learned from this documentary was actually just proof of something that I had always suspected, that Jed the Fish has always been faking that ridiculous accent that he always talks with on the air. In his brief interviews in the movie he makes the mistake of talking in his regular voice, revealing how much of a fake he really is. On the other hand, he is, in fact, an entertainer, so I don't want to give the impression that he is some kind of fraud because he talks with a fake accent on the air. He's been on KROQ for some ridiculous number of years, so he must be doing something right. Not my thing, I guess. I think I may have just developed this contempt for KROQ for ruining great songs and popularizing bad songs in the ten years or so since I first moved to Irvine and started listening to them.

The thing that I really liked about this documentary is that it really gives good insight into the life of Rodney Bingenheimer, who seems like some geeky guy who made his way into rock stardom by a simple love of music and what must have been a very disarming and unusually charming demeanor. For some reason he reminds me of this 1978 Honda Civic that I had in high school, it was the crappiest car in the parking lot but everyone loved it. I remember lots all the hot Flygirls used to always want to drive it, it was like a toy. Interpret that as you will, I still haven't figured it out.

There are moments in the film when I almost felt bad for being so bored by Rodney's radio program, because despite having been experienced far more than every high school kid's dreams of the, ah, fleshy pearls of rock and roll decadence, Rodney has been through a lot of pain in his life. He had some truly heartbreaking experiences in his life growing up, which are kind of manifested in scenes like the one where he goes to visit his parents, with whom he had something of a falling out, and finds that they don't have any pictures of him in the front room. The saddest thing is that he brings the camera crew into a back room and points to a picture of himself, framed on hung on the wall but almost hidden in a corner where no one would ever see it. And he acted like it was perfectly normal.

Rodney's demeanor that thing that really leaves the film open to interpretation. Despite having just watched a documentary about the guy, I feel like I know less about him than I knew before, just because he is such a closed off kind of person. There are scenes when he genuinely loses his temper, and there are scenes where he is clearly uncomfortable and comes right out and says that he doesn't want to talk about certain things, but at the same time he discloses information about himself that almost anyone else would probably find embarrassing.

This is one of the rare instances in documentary film-making where you can learn so much about a person but come away from it amazed at how little you really know about him. It's like the old saying, the more I learn, the more I realize I don't know. Rodney is a truly unique person with a truly unique personality, and while I can't claim to have been entertained by his radio show even for a minute, he is certainly a fascinating person to learn about. Especially since I went to high school listening to the kind of music that he introduced to the world and I now live in the area that is portrayed in the movie. All music fans should watch this.

George Hickenlooper was a director who excelled at telling peoples' stories. Edie Sedwick in Factory Girl. Jack Abramoff in Casino Jack. And documentaries on Dennis Hopper, Apocalypse Now, Peter Bogdanovich, Monte Hellman and this take of Rodney Bingenheimer, Rodney on the ROQ, the Mayor of the Sunset Strip, the man who launched so many bands into American consciousness.

When Rodney was 16, his mother dropped him off at Connie Stevens' house, told him to get her autograph and abandoned him. He ended up as a stand-in for Davy Jones, as the live-in publicist for Sonny & Cher, opened a club, brought glam to the U.S. and took to the air on Los Angeles' KROQ.

The list of bands that Rodney broke on his show includes The Runaways, Blondie, the Ramones, Social Distortion, Van Halen, Duran Duran, Oasis, The Donnas, No Doubt, The Offspring, The Go-Go's, The B-52's, X, The Smiths, Suicidal Tendencies, Dramarama and Nena.

In fact, I always wondered how a song like "99 Luft Balloons" broke in our country. It was because Nina Hagen and Christiane Felscherinow liked the song and asked Rodney to play it. The rest was 80's video history. And in the same way he brought glam to the U.S., he'd bring Britpop here as well.

This movie took six years to produce and presents Rodney as a Zelig, a person that was there for the biggest moments in rock 'n roll. He got Bowie his record contract, but he lives in a small apartment and until 2017, was happy playing music on Sundays from midnight to 3 AM on KROQ. But no more.

Rodney wasn't the only Mayor of the Sunset Strip. There was also Bobby Jameson, who released Songs of Protest and Anti-Protest under the name Chris Lucey. He appears in Mondo Hollywood and his role in the Sunset Strip riots earned him the title.

Then, there was the shadowy cult figure Kim Fowley, who held sway over the Runaways (duBeat-e-o),recorded the song "Alley Oop," wrote "They're Coming to Take Me Away Ha-Haaa!," co-wrote "King of the NIght Time World" for KISS, produced the demos for Gilby Clarke's band Cherry, started another version of the Runaways and even had the time to make a mess of underground films.

Rodney comes from a time when celebrity actually mattered, when rock and roll felt like something and when one play of a song could make you rich and get you laid. We'll never know that era again.

If you enjoy spending time in the company of has-beens, wanna-be's, and self-absorbed C-list "celebrities," you're going to love this cheesily-produced, amateurishly directed, sloppily edited mess of a documentary focused on the delusions of a pitiable LA disc jockey, who would have profited more from a stay in an institution than from being profiled by this crew of talentless exploiters. If you can make it past the first five minutes (a feat that should be rewarded with a big-money prize),you're in for a real treat — about 90 more minutes of the same meandering, pointless drivel. What you see is what you get. There is no story arc, nothing to be learned, no surprises — just endless footage of this sad little man in a silly haircut and the monstrous fame- driven ciphers he has surrounded himself with. Two stars only for confirming that LA, Hollywood, and the celebrity racket in general are the most pathetic life-sucking ratholes yet devised by humankind. To paraphrase the late, great Sonny Liston, I'd rather be a lamppost in Baltimore than the Mayor of the Sunset Strip.