Review: ‘Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band’ documents a dream gone up in smoke

It’s Bruce Springsteen who says it best: “It was like you’d never heard them before and like they’d always been there forever and ever.” Springsteen is talking about the Band, a dazzling group that for a brief period in the late 1960s used a combination of rock, country and blues to jump start the Americana sound and set the popular music world on its ear. The story of the rise and disintegration of the Band turns out to be as compelling as its spectacular music, and it’s good to have the tale told and the group’s formidable sounds heard one more time, in the documentary “Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band,” directed by Daniel Roher. More than that, as Hawkins, at age 85 one of the film’s most engaging interviews, avows, playing together the five Hawks “shot past me musically like a bolt of lightning.” The group took a leap forward in visibility when it came to the attention of Bob Dylan and became the band that backed him and faced hostile crowds on the infamous Going Electric tours, leading Dylan, interviewed briefly here, to call them “gallant knights standing behind me.” When Dylan ended up moving to Woodstock, the group followed and even persuaded Helm, who’d left during the Dylan tour, to join them in a brightly painted house that became iconic when the group, having decided to call itself the Band, released “Music From Big Pink” in 1968. “The Last Waltz,” the concert and Scorsese film commemorating the official end of the Band in its original incarnation, was apparently Robertson’s idea, and the rest of the gang did not necessarily love it.