Sundance Announces M.I.A. And Joan Jett Docs, Blaze Foley Biopic

Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images

Sundance Announces M.I.A. And Joan Jett Docs, Blaze Foley Biopic

Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images

Next year’s Sundance Film Festival just announced the list of movies, both features and documentaries, that’ll appear in competition at next year’s festivals. A ton of the movies have music-world connections. The list includes documentaries about M.I.A. and Joan Jett, a biopic about the country-music outlaw Blaze Foley, and the directorial debut of the Coup’s Boots Riley.

The M.I.A. doc is called Matangi/Maya/M.I.A., and it’s the formerly “blacklisted” portrait of the artist from director Stephen Loveridge. It’ll include personal footage drawn from the past few decades. Meanwhile, the Joan Jett documentary is called Bad Reputation, and it’ll look at the full arc of Jett’s career, starting with her time in the Runaways. Kevin Kerslake directed it. And while it’s not, strictly speaking, a music documentary, there’s also Studio 54, a new doc about the infamous New York nightclub. And Believer features Dan Reynolds, the Mormon frontman of Imagine Dragons, investigating his church’s treatment of its LGBTQ members.

In the feature category, there’s Blaze, the movie about the live of Texan country outlaw Blaze Foley; Ethan Hawke both stars and directs. Meanwhile, the veteran rapper and first-time director Boots Riley has made Sorry To Bother You, a dystopian tale of a telemarketer who “discovers a magical key to professional success.” The cast includes Lakeith Stanfield, Tessa Thompson, and Armie Hammer, and tUnE-yArDs did the score. Meanwhile, Daveed Diggs, of clipping. and a lot of other things, is both a star and screenwriter of the buddy comedy Blindspotting, which was directed by Carlos Lopez Estrada, who’s done many of clipping.’s brain-exploding videos. Nick Offerman and Kiersey Clemons star in Hearts Beat Loud, a movie about a father/daughter songwriting team.

You can see the full list here.

more from News