Stories and images about celebrities in our culture, and few of us — even those of us who claim to be removed from pop culture — can claim our distance from the obesession with fame and stardom. Have you ever acquired an autograph or waited in line to get tickets to see a particular musician or hear a particular speaker? Case in point.

George Hickenlooper’s documentary The Mayor of Sunset Strip, which I had the privilege of viewing last night as part of the SXSW film festival, offers a brilliant psychological study of our collective obsession with fame. Using Los Angeles KROQ disc jockey Rodney Bingenheimer as a case study/metaphor for American culture’s obsession with fame, the film suggests that this obsession grew out of the culture of the 1960s and has become a means of coping with the dissolution of the nuclear family as the defining structure in our lives. As we seek love and belonging to compensate for this lack, we look toward a dream that can almost never be achieved, but which seems to offer us the prospect of taking on importance and of belonging.

Featuring interviews with a long list of big names ranging from The Rolling Stones to No Doubt to The Sex Pistols, the documentary markets itself partially though celebrity praise. But as Hickenlooper told me, he was concerned that the long list of big names featured in the film would prove counterproductive, turning viewers off from seeing the film since images and interviews with those subjects are so pervasive in our culture. But as the second most successful documentary of all time — even before widescale release — this has proven to be anything but the case. Instead, as Hickenlooper suggested, viewers and film critics have been so attracted to The Mayor of Sunset Strip because it exposes a very visceral aspect of these subjects through their connection to the man who put them on the map. By characterizing celebrities in such human terms, Hickenlooper reveals that fame isn’t all that it is cracked up to be, but that it is also something that is almost universally desirable in Western culture.

I could go on and on. But I’ll spare you. See the film for yourself when it is released in theaters across the country at the end of March and April.

Whether you see the film for the interviews with some big names or to interrogate your connection to capitalist culture and the obsession with fame that it helps produce, you are sure to be impressed. And probably a bit disturbed.

Laura Nathan-Garner