Of all the legendary, cautionary tales of shoulda’ been contenders in Rock history perhaps none went on to have as profound an influence on future artists as Big Star. After all, the losers, beautiful or otherwise, are supposed to remain in the cut-out bins with a small but dedicated fan base of maybe a couple of hundred stalwart fans proudly fanning whatever flickering flame remains. But the funny thing about Big Star was that the couple hundred stalwarts who kept their flame alive after they never caught on the first time around were mostly rock critics and aspiring rock performers. And what happened in the intervening decades is that the music of Big Star, a truly lost band during the 70s, wound up being disseminated through a thousand music reviews and a thousand demo reels going forward to become something like an archetype, a touchstone for the entire Indie and Alternative Rock scene. It somehow became instant street cred to name check Alex Chilton and Chris Bell, to seek out the original vinyl of the band’s seminal albums back in the days where you couldn’t just hit up iTunes and own it in an instant, to lay down a ragged cover of “Back of a Car” during a gig. But beyond the entrancing complexity and slowly dawning greatness of their ostensible pop music, Big Star was also shrouded in mystery, with a lot of vague tales about record deals gone bad, mental illness and creative self-destruction. Which, of course, only added to their mystique. At long last, 2012’s comprehensive documentary, Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me, shines a light on the mysteries that beguiled and bedeviled their fans for so many years. It also proves yet again that all that retrospective adulation was well earned, however bittersweet their career trajectory.

Formed in 1971 by Memphis natives Alex Chilton and Chris Bell, the original lineup also consisted of drummer Jody Stephens (the only surviving founding member) and bassist Andy Hummel. Chilton was already well established, having been a teen sensation as the blue-eyed soul frontman for The Box Tops, a well-produced outfit that clocked several hits including 1967’s classic Billboard #1, “The Letter” (later covered to even more dramatic effect by Joe Cocker). Chris Bell was a local kid dreaming of the Beatles and pop success, as well as an outlet for all the achingly beautiful and earnest compositions swimming around in his head. The result of their intersection was Big Star and their debut album, #1 Record, an unusally accomplished masterpiece with roots in the singer-songwriter ethos of the 60s but leavened with the angular hooks of British invasion power pop and more than a pinch of the Velvet Underground’s sonic subversiveness. Cuts such as “In The Street” (later famously covered by Cheap Trick as the title song for That 70s Show), “Thirteen” and “When my Baby’s Beside Me” spin gold from conventional romantic youth rebellion through the freshness of their composition and the unabashed belief in the power of the 3-minute pop single. As drummer Stephens wryly observes in the documentary, it could be said that by choosing such audaciously cocky names for their band and debut album they were tempting the Rock gods, as well as showing confidence (or hope) in their endeavor. But knowing Chilton’s later oeuvre, the implicit irony of such grandiosity seems entirely intentional.

Despite being universally praised by rock critics and industry mags, 1972’s #1 Record went nowhere fast due to the vagaries of bad timing and worse distribution. Their label Ardent, a terrific local outfit with a primo recording setup and brilliant hands-on founder, John Fry, at the controls, had recently been acquired by the legendary soul powerhouse down the street, Stax Records, as a sort of overflow valve for Stax’s plethora of acts. But what sounded like a perfect merger representing the different sounds of Memphis proved an unequal partnership, as Stax had no expertise in the white pop department and soon allowed Columbia Records to take over their entire distribution network. And Columbia gave Big Star’s very non-Stax sounding debut zero distribution support, dooming what should have been at least a minor commercial breakthrough for the nascent band to nothing more than an object of cult worship for years to come. (While I’ve never agreed with the theory that Big Star were too hopelessly out of step with the “heavy 70s” to really chart, as witness the success of the Raspberries and Badfinger to name a couple of “lighter” acts that got serious radio play at the time, I do feel that there is an overriding offbeat and tricky quality to Big Star’s music that would always have made widespread popular success unlikely. It’s the very thing that makes them stand up to literally hundreds of listens, that lack of short-lived pure pop sugar rush in favor of more idiosyncratic hooks. Still, Columbia sure as hell should have done better by them…)

The inexplicable failure of #1 Record to make any kind of dent nationally led to massive tensions within the band: Bell was essentially crushed by seeing his impatient dreams of stardom, which seemed nearly within reach, unfairly denied him. Heavily self-medicating with drugs and alcohol to combat his increasing depression, Bell became erratic and fought with his bandmates, smashing equipment and going so far as to erase some of the master tapes for #1 Record.  With Bell quitting, the band broke up but quickly reunited as a trio for a second album, Radio City, released in 1974. Dominated by Chilton and including the stone classics, “September Gurls” and the acid-tipped “You Get What You Deserve”, Radio City suffered the same criminal neglect by Columbia as #1 Record had and likewise barely made a dent nationally.

Chilton’s reaction to this latest setback was to further turn his back on commercialism and viable hit making, recruiting oddball but borderline genius producer Jim Dickenson to help him shape the music that would become Third/Sister Lovers. With only Stephens left from the original lineup, a melange of guest musicians helped Chilton craft a brilliant and disturbing document of melancholia, defiance and the sounds of his rock and roll spirit battling with utter despair.  Willfully anti-commercial but also starkly beautiful, Third never had a shot — when the best songs are downbeat numbers like “Holocaust” (“You’re a wasted face/You’re a sad-eyed lie/You’re a holocaust”) and “Nighttime” (“Get me out of here/I hate it here”) big airplay in the mid-1970s was not in the cards. Shortly after this triumph of brutally honest soul-baring was completed, the original incarnation of Big Star broke up for good.

Nothing Can Hurt Me is not a perfect documentary — it’s almost too devoted to the totality of the Memphis scene of the era which, while interesting, probably could have been moved to the extras section of a DVD, thereby streamlining its slightly-too-long, slightly diffuse 1 hour 51 minutes. But it is invaluable in tracing and noting the inverted arc of a band that rightly should have been big from the start but never got any love until the 1980s, when their resurgence really began. And today, well into the 2000s, Big Star is arguably a more significant talisman for aspiring alternative rockers and the fans that love them than ever before.

It’s likely, though, that they were doomed from the start for the simple reason that their two most powerful contributors were coming at rock stardom from opposite directions: Alex Chilton had already been about as famous as anyone could be and spent his late teenage years on grueling, soul deadening tours with the Box Tops, singing the same handful of hits over and over. When Big Star didn’t click, he became ever more rebellious and caustic towards the requirements of fame, willfully moving further and further away from commercial material, essentially flipping the bird to the very possibility of sales success with an album like Third. Coming at it from the other direction, Chris Bell desperately aspired to make it, to be another Paul McCartney, and when it didn’t happen he took it personally in extremis by feeling that the world had rejected him, subsequently plunging into drug-fueled mental illness. Bell was the ultimate permanent adolescent, as his brilliantly self-absorbed solo album, I Am the Cosmos, demonstrates so clearly. With Chilton’s taste for fame curdled into cynicism by Big Star’s rejection and Bell’s fragile spirit crushed by it, the two were only destined to collaborate for a very short time. One wonders what might have been different had #1 Record  been the smash hit they hoped for, or at least some kind of hit. Would they have gone on to be the 70s version of Lennon & McCartney, Jagger & Richards or at least a sort of hybrid Ray Davies-Eric Carmen mashup? How would Rock history have been changed if only Columbia Records had put a scintilla of effort into promoting their records? But then if that had happened there wouldn’t be the legend of Big Star. And we wouldn’t need the fine, ironically titled Nothing Can Hurt Me to recount it so beautifully and with such majestic sadness.