From the Sky Down: U2's struggle to get its joy back

Directed by Davis Guggenheim (USA)

Big-time director Davis Guggenheim ( An Inconvenient Truth, It Might Get Loud) is at the helm, but this documentary on the Irish quartet U2 in creative flux at the end of the 1980s is not the significant film his others are. It does serve, though, as an essential companion piece to the upcoming 20-year-anniversary reissue of U2's pivotal album Achtung Baby – the sound, according to Bono, of four men chopping down The Joshua Tree, the epochal record that came before. With candid band interviews and unearthed archival footage and demos, the process of U2 dreaming itself a new fashion while struggling to get its joy back is tightly and adroitly explored, with special light thrown on the mysterious ways of musicians – or artists of any kind, for that matter – who refuse to run in place.

Sept. 8, 6:30 p.m., Elgin; Sept. 8, 8 p.m., Roy Thomson; Sept. 17, 6 p.m., Ryerson