Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story

By far the strongest instalment is the opener, which can be watched in isolation as an evocative charge through the period leading up to the band’s formation and breakthrough. The best rockumentaries have the power to pitch us into a past moment we wish we could hang out in – the place and time here that crackles with fantastic potential is New Jersey in the back half of the 1970s.

It’s Bon Jovi’s own decision-making that figures into the biggest dramatic hook in Thank You, which is the whys and hows of Sambora’s departure, and that will certainly keep us watching.

Thank You, Goodnight is undeniably brave. Jon didn’t need to open himself up this much. But rather like a protracted heavy metal guitar solo, the documentary just goes on for a bit too long.

Like the anthemic songs the platinum-selling New Jersey-born singer is known for, it would take an extra step to actively dislike this very by-the-numbers Hulu documentary, but the excessive length and the overblown manner in which it tries to manufacture drama does get a bit irritating. Put bluntly, there just isn’t much going on in this sanctioned and manicured portrait, yet it still goes on forever.

There’s not enough depth to the modern sections of the series to really give us an understanding of the band as it stands anyway, beyond having lost two founding members and hitting forty years of making music.

Thank You, Goodnight is a perfectly nice retrospective, approachable and amiable and affectionate. But that’s not the same thing as saying it’s a particularly insightful one. Even as Jon subjects himself to what must have been dozens or hundreds of hours of interviews, he (or perhaps Chopra) keeps himself at too much of a distance to come fully into focus.