‘Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger’ Review: A Reunion Bigger Than the Gallaghers
The Gallagher brothers put aside their differences for an Oasis reunion, discovering that their music now belongs as much to their fans as themselves.
Who would have imagined, more than three decades after they first got together, that the Gallagher brothers would make a humanistic documentary, one centered more on their fans than on themselves, and that they would ultimately end up delivering a message of affection, solidarity and empathy for each other and for others? Time passes, you hit your fifty-somethings, and things don’t look quite the way they used to. D’ya know wha’ I mean? The attitude may still be there, at least for a while, but the heart has moved on to other places. And what once seemed important, unforgivable and/or a matter of life and death is now something nobody remembers. Not even them.
In that sense, Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger is really two documentaries in one. The first, which takes up the film’s opening half-hour and resurfaces from time to time afterward, focuses on the band’s fall and resurrection, revisiting the creative explosion and personal chaos that defined their first two decades and bringing the brothers back together after 15 years apart for a series of early rehearsals that are as tense as they are choppy, making it seem almost impossible that things will work out. Noel, serious and professional, rehearses every song with the band from the start and stays until the very end. Liam, meanwhile, arrives like the rockstar he is: he walks in, drops his bag, sings the songs and, barely speaking to anyone, walks out.
It’s his way of easing the tension: no hugs, no apologies, no soul-searching. What brought us together, and keeps us together, what saved us and will save us, is the music. And that’s what the Gallaghers set out to do. As the rest of the documentary unfolds, it becomes clear that this initial attitude — exaggerated or not by the script from Steve Knight, who knows — was merely a shell. By the end of the tour, they are getting along better than before, without the tension, more like partners, almost friends. More softies than anyone might have expected, and brothers again. At one point, you could say that music saved their relationship. But perhaps the documentary’s real thesis is something else: what saved it was the people. Or, rather, the connection between people and their music.
Because after that first half-hour of rehearsals and right up until opening night — it took Noel a little longer to get there, he admits — there are more nerves and doubts than anything else. But once the tour gets going, something happens between the stage and the audience. Something in the faces of the fans, in the hugs and tears, the parents and children, the emotion and the songs being screamed at the top of their lungs, dismantles all those tensions. It makes them feel like part of something bigger, something that at this point is greater than they are. It is no longer simply Oasis the band, but the myth, the history, a torch being passed down through generations, and a collection of songs that meant — and still mean — so much to people all over the world.
That is why the film gradually abandons the usual “behind the scenes” approach and makes the fans the focus of the tour. There are brief stories from around the world, moments of emotion and, above all, face after face from different generations, ecstatic, moved and deeply affected by a collection of songs they once thought they would never get to hear live. There are also various excursions into the cities themselves, highlighting the importance certain places, people and memories have for the band. And running through it all is an idea expressed by both brothers, connected to Oasis’s relationship with the working classes: those who couldn’t get tickets (or couldn’t afford them), those who still prefer getting together with friends for a drink rather than spending all day staring at their phones, and those who are struggling “in this fucking time.”
In between, there are the songs, which sound powerful live and which the band seems to keep fine-tuning as the shows go on. Songs like Some Might Say, Whatever, Supersonic, Wonderwall, Don’t Look Back in Anger, Acquiesce and many others not only sound pretty damn good, but are clearly meaningful to a lot of people. Noel’s simple, straightforward lyrics, once criticized for precisely their lack of subtlety or elegance (their “rivals” in the ’90s, after all, were Blur and Pulp, considerably more sophisticated in that regard), have become iconic for their fans, who not only know every word by heart but sing them in 2025 with all the emotional weight they have accumulated over the years. Singing a hit that has just come out on the radio in 1994 is not the same thing (believe me, I was there) as singing those same lines 30 years later, when they have become part of your life and have accompanied you ever since.
The creator of Peaky Blinders, who functions almost like the documentary’s showrunner, and the two directors, Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern, realized that the film needed to become a celebration of that communal experience. Once the tour began, they turned the cameras toward the whole phenomenon. The Gallaghers give a few amusing interviews, a model of Pep Guardiola’s face watches over everything from above the stage, and there are some words about Bonehead and a tribute to the late Stone Roses bassist “Mani,” but these things remain secondary. We also never really find out what happened behind the scenes or many of the more intimate details of the reunion, but in the end, it doesn’t matter that much. Don’t Look Back in Anger isn’t so much a documentary about Oasis as it is about what their music — what music — means to people. Something that stays with us, helps us along and eventually comes to live with us forever.
