All I Can Say: Moving portrait of a 1990s rock’n’roll casualty

The late Shannon Hoon rightly receives a directing credit for this eerily candid account of his brief life and the fleeting sensation that was Blind Melon. The Indiana-born singer with the unmistakable falsetto began filming himself in 1990 as a hobby, an eccentric pursuit given that there were no contemporaneous platforms for such pre-Tiktok material.

His remarkable footage includes – as viewed on TVs in hotel rooms and at home – such era-defining moments as Bill Clinton being sworn in as president, the LA riots, and the Chechen-Russian conflict.

Mostly, it’s a diary chronicling Blind Melon, a band who go from having a five-song catalogue to a major record deal and a huge MTV presence thanks to director Samuel Bayer’s iconic “Bee Girl” video for No Rain, the hit song the lends this almost unbearably sad documentary its name.

A good-looking midwesterner, Hoon follows in the footsteps of his sister’s pal Axl Rose, and relocates from Lafayette, Indiana, to Hollywood, where he ends up doing backing vocals on Guns N’ Roses’ Don’t Cry. He joins forces with other small-town American musicians and forms Blind Melon.

Suddenly, they’re on Saturday Night Live and the cover of Rolling Stone. They’re playing stadiums alongside Nine Inch Nails, Ozzy Osbourne and Smashing Pumpkins. And it’s not all that he hoped it would be.

Hoon talks about music as a positive force, yet there’s a darkness lurking behind his larkishness, despite his steady and apparent devotion to his high-school sweetheart, Lisa, and his extended family.

Not too far into All I Can Say, the singer falls off the wagon after 10 months of sobriety. He talks about alcoholism having created problems within his family. His bandmates make a reference to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Mostly he’s the former chilled dude: a guy who likes to play with his niece and who is close to his mom and sister. He tells two older gentlemen that he encounters in a hotel lobby that all he really wants is enough money to have kids back in Indiana.

Sadly, Hoon’s diary-like entries to the camera become increasingly erratic. One day, in a series of hotel rooms on tour, he asks for anything that’s going and receives heroin. Not long after that, the news trickles through that Kurt Cobain has died. Hoon wonders about the impact the death will have upon Cobain’s then-infant daughter.

Lisa, his girlfriend, gives birth to Hoon’s own daughter in July 1995. Within four months, Blind Melon’s sound engineer, Lyle Eaves, finds Hoon on the tour bus, unresponsive after an overdose of cocaine. He is 28.

Directors Danny Clinch, Taryn Gould, and Colleen Hennessy have sifted through hundreds of hours of footage to fashion something that allows for a sense of the person behind the rock casualty. To this end, they do a splendid job.