Director: James D. Cooper (2015)

This knockabout documentary promises to be a profile of maverick mis-matched music managers but is really a potted history of the rock band The Who.

In 1961 two assistant directors at Shepperton studios bonded over a love of French films and a desire to direct their own films.

Confident Kit Lambert was a multi-lingual, Oxford-educated, former public school boy while Chris Stamp was the working class son of tug boat pilot. He’s also the younger brother of the actor Terence – who makes a brief appearance.

They hatched a plan to find a band, promote them by making a film about them and to use that film to secure a directors deal.

The High Numbers were discovered in a bar and quickly re-named The Who. The two surviving members Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend are given a tremendous amount of screen-time to mostly contribute waffle.

It’s suggested the anger of their guitar-smashing stage performances was as an artistic representation of their experience as war babies – but this intriguing explanation passes uncommented on and unchallenged.

An unusual creative synergy between band and management obscured how successfully a manipulator Lambert was. Recognising a songwriting talent in Townshend, he nurtured the musician and treated him more favourably than the others.

There’s tantalising glimpses of roguish behaviour such as selling vinyl records on the black market to Russia from a Viennese palazzo. But the script is light on financial detail – or any detail at all and it’s too in thrall to its subject matter to achieve much objectivity.

Too many irrelevant characters appear such as ‘Irish Jack’. Plus there are many stretches where it resembles the most unquestioning of nostalgia segments on BBC’s Football Focus where former players offer rambling anecdotes and decades old banter.

There’s lots of great music but no dissenting voices; no tales of debauchery and a general lack of scurrilous muck-raking. There is an absence of outraged former colleagues, spurned former girlfriends, alimony-demanding ex-wives or such.

It ends with an acrimonious split between all parties fuelled by creative tension, heroin addiction and death.

Like the Who’s albums, there are loud, electric moments but it lacks focus and is far too long.

★★★☆☆