Creativity, Rejection, and the Return to Purpose

MOVIE REVIEW
It's All Gonna Break
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Genre: Documentary, Music
Year Released: 2024, 2025
Runtime: 1h 29m
Director(s): Stephen Chung
Where to Watch: in select cities starting May 30, 2025, including LA and NYC

RAVING REVIEW: Before social media turned every garage band into a brand, there were music scenes built off word-of-mouth and whoever showed up with an instrument—or a camera. IT’S ALL GONNA BREAK opens a door to that moment, where collaboration wasn’t content and success wasn’t the goal. It’s not a typical music documentary and doesn’t try to be. Instead, it captures what it feels like to be in the middle of something you don’t yet realize matters—until it’s gone.

This isn’t a by-the-numbers biopic or an exhaustive history lesson. It’s something much more vulnerable. The footage comes from director Stephen Chung’s archive—nearly a thousand hours shot during the early 2000s while embedded in Toronto’s artistic scene. He wasn’t an observer looking in; he was part of the collective, capturing the chaos from the inside out. At the time, crafting a documentary hadn’t fully taken shape. The camera was simply his way of showing up with something to offer while others wrote songs or strummed guitars in crammed apartments.

That rawness gives IT’S ALL GONNA BREAK its power. You’re not watching history retold through distant recollection; you’re placed inside the noise, the silence, the waiting rooms, and the late-night living room performances. The film avoids sentimentality by leaning into texture, letting rough edges stay rough, and not forcing answers out of people still processing what that time in their lives meant.

Instead of following a straightforward timeline, the structure shuffles between then and now. The split-screen visuals become more than a stylistic flourish—they represent the dual realities of memory and current understanding, letting footage breathe while allowing present-day interviews to question, reassess, or affirm it. This interplay is where the documentary finds its pacing. It’s not interested in tying everything together; it’s focused on how different it feels to look back when you're older, maybe wiser, and certainly more weathered.

Chung steps into the frame as someone still reckoning with what it meant to have his original cut rejected. In 2007, after years of work, the band declined to move forward with the project. No dramatic fallout—just silence. That silence left him questioning the film and his place as an artist. Returning to the material after so many years, his perspective shifts. It’s no longer about capturing someone else’s rise—it’s about honoring his journey and finally finding a voice in a story he was always a part of.

What’s especially compelling is how the film captures a version of Toronto that no longer exists. The city is portrayed not as scenery, but as one of the parts of the documentary. Shared lofts, homemade venues, and the affordability that allowed entire communities to flourish come across with quiet urgency. There’s a nostalgic pull, but it’s grounded in the reality that spaces like this often vanish before their legacy is fully understood. The transformation that squeezed artists out of these creative ecosystems adds an unintended layer of melancholy, one that the film wisely doesn’t overstate.

This sense of time slipping away is mirrored in one of the film’s most powerful beats—a major festival appearance that should’ve marked a turning point but ended without an encore. It’s a moment that encapsulates the group’s uneasy relationship with mainstream recognition and fame. And yet, there’s no bitterness in how it’s presented. Just a kind of quiet acceptance that not every story resolves with a perfect ending. That restraint, opting not to manufacture drama or chase a tidy conclusion, gives the film its authenticity.

Despite the film's reflective tone, it never slips into indulgence. It walks a delicate line between honoring what once was and letting it stand on its own terms, without glorifying or apologizing. That makes it accessible to those who didn’t live through the scene, even if some moments will resonate more deeply with insiders. For those unfamiliar with the cultural reference points, it may feel like stepping into someone else’s photo album. But Chung invites viewers to sit with that discomfort rather than explain it away.

There’s an argument to be made that what sets the documentary apart is its refusal to resolve its emotional questions. It’s a film about loose ends, about what happens when creativity isn’t followed by closure. But embracing that unfinished quality ends up saying something much more truthful than a documentary that tries to wrap everything in a bow.

By centering the filmmaker’s vulnerability and connecting it to the community he once captured, IT’S ALL GONNA BREAK does more than document a moment—it gives that moment a new kind of meaning, not because it was planned that way, but because it couldn’t be told until now.

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[photo courtesy of FATHOM FILM GROUP, CARGO FILM]

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