REVIEW: The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers

This is a sensitive piece of filmmaking with insights into the band's origins as well as how its members today, once head-banging punk rockers, now feel about their lives and legacies.

The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers: Our Brother, Hillel is also a film about the wild and creative milieu of Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s.

The use of a digitally engineered voice for Hillel, the beloved bandmate who died of a drug overdose in 1988, could raise eyebrows.

But it comes across as natural here in between the other bandmate interviews, which get surprisingly emotional, and alongside montages of their early days and Hillel's original artwork and writings.

It's also interesting to reflect on the free-range life of kids in the 1970s, with all its pros and cons, as compared to childhood today.

Review originally published by Common Sense Media

Images courtesy of Netflix