Kevin Macleod, into the spotlight
Not rated. 91 minutes. Apple TV, Google Play and other platforms.
Kevin Macleod is arguably the most prolific composer you’ve never heard of — although it’s very likely you’ve heard his music. The Wisconsinborn musician, who has at times resided in New
York, is a pioneer both of digital production and distribution. Essentially, he gives much of his music away. Working though the nonprofit organization Creative Commons, he makes his instrumental pieces available either for a one-time fee, or free. His works wind up on YouTube and Tiktok videos, in video games, in big-budget studio films (like Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo”) and pornographic movies.
Directed by Ryan Camarda, “Royalty Free: The Music of Kevin Macleod,” conveys the scale of its subject’s achievement while offering an unnerving portrait of the man himself. He is in his late 40s, and he’s not quite what you would call amiable. He has a lot of definite ideas on a variety of topics, including morality in art, and his statements are sometimes startling. At one point he asserts that he wouldn’t care if his music found its way into a movie about “Nazis killing puppies.”
The documentary is shot and edited like an infomercial, although it wanders from issue to issue to the extent that a viewer can’t be sure just what it’s pitching. And while it sometimes celebrates Macleod, there are instances when the filmmaker seems to fret about how many instrumentalists are being put out of work by one-computer bands like Macleod (something that’s been worrying musicians’ unions and others since even before the all-electronic band Kraftwerk made waves in the early 1970s).
Macleod then drops in a very personal detail, about an hour and 15 minutes in: “Right now, I treat a lot of my depression with alcohol, and it works.” Which throws an already wobbly movie into another orbit entirely.