'How Can You Mend a Broken Heart': Super Bee Gees documentary

WHAT IT'S ABOUT This two-hour retrospective of the Bee Gees from five-time Oscar nominee Frank Marshall covers the British invasion years, the "Miami Sound" of the '70s, through to the '80s when they find new relevance as songwriters for Barbra Streisand, Dionne Warwick and (even) Dolly Parton, no slouch of a songwriter herself. Barry Gibb, 74, is interviewed, while the film relies on archival interviews with brothers Maurice (who died in 2003) and Robin (who died in 2012). (Andy, the youngest of the Gibb brothers, died in 1988 at 30.)

MY SAY Marshall's portrait is big, generous and almost comprehensive. It tarries not on the tragedies, but flips through them in the final seconds, with a series of black cards announcing what we all knew (and dreaded) was coming anyway. Its subject is vast, complicated and fraught, but distills the real contribution in exactly the right way: The Bee Gees were pop songwriters of genius.

Who knew? Clearly their collaborators, partners and record companies did. The rest of the world just kept riding one wave after another, genre after genre, hit after hit — Brit pop, R&B, funk, disco, top 40, country — oblivious to that genius.

Waves also have a way of crashing, and the Bee Gees rode their share of those, too, notably in 1979 when a bloodthirsty Chicago DJ lit the match that killed disco and (nearly) the Bee Gees along with it. Vince Lawrence, the "house music" pioneer, was an usher at Chicago's Comiskey Park the day anti-fans were told to bring their records to the ballpark where they would be blown up as part of a ceremonial disco auto da fe. He calls the violent demonstration "a racist, homophobic book-burning [which] the Bee Gees got caught up in because they were part of the culture that was lifting a lot of [other] people up."

Some of the finest pop songs in music history nearly went up in the smoke of that day, but this reminds us that they live on, as vital and as danceable as ever.

In exploring authorship of this huge catalog (1,000-plus songs), Marshall doesn't exactly subvert the popular notion that Barry was the primary force behind it. What's so revelatory is just how creatively and vocally conjoined the brothers were. (Maurice and Robin, in fact, were fraternal twins.) Long after the Bee Gees arrived in Miami in search of a new beginning and new sound — they would find both, of course, thanks to keyboardist Blue Weaver, sound engineer Karl Richardson and producers Albhy Galuten and Arif Mardin — the core three held fast. Always a fractious unit, they were ultimately an indivisible one.

A deep melancholy drapes these two hours, while Barry, now officially the Last Surviving Bee Gee, concludes that "I'd rather have [my brothers] all back here and no hits at all." We're left with Justin Timberlake's assessment instead: "There's nothing left to say about the Bee Gees except they were [expletive] awesome."

[Expletive] right, Justin. They sure were.

BOTTOM LINE The tribute film the Bee Gees deserved. A beauty.