Bittersweet Motel heaved a ton of inadvertent melancholia on my poor, baseball capped head. Here's why:

• I saw it just six short hours before the most recent g-friend and I admitted that we were calling it quits, and the calm before the storm is never calm. The film had a scene with, like, a hundred happy, hoppy naked hippie chicks, something one should never look at when one knows one is about to cleave oneself from regular sex.

• The film was made by guys I kinda-sorta knew at NYU, from the director Todd Phillips (he of Road Trip, among other, better films) down to some of the PAs. And I can't for the life of me finish any of my epic rock films.

• The band Phish, which, if you didn't know, is the subject of the documentary Bittersweet Motel, was an integral part of my care-free young adult years, which I didn't until just now realize are over. I live now, I've discovered, in my care-full young adult years.

• And, last reason, dig, Trey fuckin' wails. That breaks your heart in a good way.

Phish get a solid Last Waltz treatment. Director Philips, he of infinite self-promotion, has ably gotten the word out that he hardly knew jack-shit about Anastasio, McConnell, Fishman and Gordon before shooting the concert footage and backstage shenanigans that make up Bittersweet Motel. It shows. The film is amused, not reverential, investigatory, not muckraking.

Among the perfect moments: a goofy drunk Trey singing to Page about his new shirt; a baffled Trey reading stacks of bad reviews of his work; a vexed Trey proclaiming that he is not Jerry Garcia and, by extension, freeing himself of rock journo's descriptions, and liberating the self-described New Jersey suburban pre-teen who "learned about music by going to the mall." It's an avalanche of confession.

But it all comes down to the music. There's plenty of jamming, some of the "nice" songs ("Waste" is one of the few songs played in its entirety) and super music video camera work.

Attention is given to the notorious "phans," I mean, how could you not, but we are spared too much of this. Just enough to show that 85 percent of Phish concert-goers (see the above photo, which is not a still from Bittersweet Motel) are assholes. But 85 percent of the general population are assholes, so no sweat.

The movie follows Phish on tour, first in the Rochester and NYC (a fabled New Year's show), then to Europe—here's where we see the boys bathe their pasty Burlington bods in the Spanish sun to the tune of "Frankenstein"—then to the mammoth "Great Went" 3-day festival in Maine. That's where the naked chicks come in.

What did I learn most about Phish? That they're goofballs. Kinda obnoxious, but in an endearing, un-Spinal Tap (or even Rolling Stones) way. And they don't seem to be too into drugs. They practice too hard for that. And for hippies, they seem strangely into guns 'n such. For the most part, they take their jobs really seriously, and they like what they do. This is most evident in an early rehearsal scene, when they are mapping out a new chart, and the four musicians are throwing ideas at one another, humming notes in falsetto, laughing at concepts, tossing in TV show themes to crack the others up . . . many say that Phish are the heir apparent to the Grateful Dead. I say they keep alive the torch of Frank Zappa.

And Trey fuckin' wails, dude. Trey fuckin' wails.