“Pulp: A Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets” puts a neighborhood spin on the typical rock documentary. Though there are the expected scenes of the Britpop rockers performing onstage and discussing their careers, the film is largely an affectionate look at the Pulp’s fans and its hometown, Sheffield, England.
“I always thought that these days, if you want to know the whole story of Pulp, you can look at Wikipedia,” said the director Florian Habicht, 39. “We didn’t want to make a traditional film, where the band is like God, and there’s separation between them and the fans.”
Mr. Habicht’s egalitarian approach to the documentary, which opens nationwide on Wednesday and for digital rental and download on Nov. 21, seems well suited to a band like Pulp, whose witty, literate anthems on class struggle and sexuality were touchstones of the 1990s British rock scene.
The film is framed around a rousing concert in Sheffield in December 2012, the last stop in Britain on the band’s international reunion tour. The group had gone on hiatus shortly after the release of its seventh album, “We Love Life,” in 2001. Footage of the Sheffield show is woven throughout the film. Viewers see Jarvis Cocker, the band’s charismatic frontman, preening and dancing wildly as he sings its biggest hit, “Common People,” while his boisterous audience howls the chorus back at him.
Elsewhere, Mr. Habicht’s camera captures a host of colorful local characters: newspaper vendors, fishmongers and knifemakers as well as precocious children and philosophical pensioners. One young man in smeared glam-rock makeup pokes fun at the close-knit community in his hometown, saying, “You’ll usually know the person that’s mugging you.” Mr. Habicht prompts a still-dripping swimmer to recreate Mr. Cocker’s trademark haughty stage poses, and he chats with a coterie of Mr. Cocker’s giggling female fans as they wait at the gates of the concert.
He also intersperses staged sequences, including Mr. Cocker fixing a tire roadside and feeding ducks, and a teenage dance troupe shimmying to the band’s coming-of-age song “Disco 2000.” The drummer Nick Banks displays his daughter’s soccer jersey, which is emblazoned with Pulp’s logo, because the members sponsor her team.
Mr. Cocker said that he and Mr. Habicht’s shared interest in capturing the band’s fans was a driving motivation for making the film. “When you are on a stage, you’re always wondering who’s in the audience, and you haven’t got a chance to find that out,” Mr. Cocker, 51, said by phone from Paris in a rare interview. “You might catch the eye of one person, but you don’t have any insight into what they do with their life.”
Mr. Habicht, a longtime Pulp fan, met Mr. Cocker when Mr. Habicht invited him to the London Film Festival premiere of his New York-based comedy “Love Story” in October 2012, just six weeks before the Sheffield homecoming. Even before he had found financing for the film, Mr. Habicht, a German-born New Zealander, traveled to Sheffield for the first time, alone and armed only with Mr. Cocker’s book of lyrics, “Mother, Brother, Lover.” The copy is annotated throughout by the singer with his recommendations for local bus stops, markets and other landmarks.
“In the middle of winter, it’s pretty grim up there, and he didn’t know anybody,” Mr. Cocker said. “It was like he was parachuted into the middle of Vietnam without a map.”
The gray cityscape underscores one of the film’s dominant themes, aging. In a bittersweet scripted scene, an elderly choir sings Pulp’s sympathetic yet cheeky ballad “Help the Aged,” the quavering harmonies adding a sense of poignancy. In interviews, the members of Pulp are often preoccupied with their own advancing years; the keyboardist Candida Doyle reveals her longtime struggles with rheumatoid arthritis, and Mr. Cocker admits anxiety over re-forming Pulp after a nearly decade-long hiatus.
“The band started thinking: ‘Can we do it anymore? If we’re ever going to, we should do it whilst we’re not too decrepit and fragile,’ ” Mr. Cocker said. “Rock music itself is middle-aged now. If you think of 1955 as Year Zero, then it’s coming up to 60. That’s almost getting too old, isn’t it? But you can rekindle that spark gained from ideas when you were younger.”
Wes Anderson, a “devoted Pulp fan” who worked with Mr. Cocker on Mr. Anderson’s movie “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” said he appreciated the documentary’s emotional bridge between musicians and listeners. “There are wonderful live performances of great, great songs,” he said by email. “It is the relationship between the band and their audience that I found most moving.”
Dan Berger, 32, co-president of Oscilloscope Laboratories, the documentary’s American distributor, predicted that Mr. Habicht’s approach will influence other filmmakers. “If you were to break it down, you’d probably have more screen time with random folks around the street than with any members of the band,” he said. “In some ways, that provides a better picture of who Pulp are. I think we’ll see this technique quite a few times again.”
Reviews of the film after its premiere at the SXSW Film Conference & Festival in March were generally favorable in American media outlets, including Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and The Los Angeles Times. But the British music magazine NME was more restrained. “If there’s a criticism to make, it’s only that Pulp are such a fascinating band that it’s a shame so much of the story is skipped over — we hear a little about the success of ‘Different Class,’ ” the band’s breakthrough album, “and the dark fallout that led to ‘This Is Hardcore,’ ,” its follow-up, “but the rest of their career is only briefly alluded to.”
For his part, Mr. Cocker said that the documentary had a practical benefit for him recently. “I had to change a tire on the street, and it all came back to me from the film,” he said. “If people want a recommendation for why they should see it, at least you will learn how to change a tire.”