There are a few 5 star user reviews on here that rabbit on about "one man's mission", etc. Please note that in my opinion the critics' reviews more accurately reflect what this film is about and what it stands for.
I was quite involved in the CBGB and downtown New York music scene in the 1970s. I was also a good friend and business colleague of Hilly Kristal, the man whose vision is supposedly being depicted in the film.
In my opinion it does not reflect what Hilly would have wanted his legacy to be. Why? Not because it's main "laugh lines" revolve around subjects like his dog's loose bowels; not because it dwells on his supposed lack of business acumen(tough to not know anything what you're doing about business and leave an estate of $3.7 million); and not because of all of the other factual and musical mistakes in the film that others have pointed out already. I will not bother to list them all. Most of the critics' reviews do list them successfully.
To me why this film is so bad is two fold.
1. It doesn't reflect the spirit of downtown NY in any way I ever saw except possibly the parody of it that was Punk Magazine which we all admired as a humorous side line to events at the time but in no way represented the artistic aspirations of the early artists ((I stress early as in Television, Ramones, Patti Smith, Mink De Ville, Suicide) who were supported by Hilly and the other club owners of NY and who frequented CBGB, Max's Kansas City and the other bars downtown and uptown.
2. It's incredibly badly made. Almost everything about it on the production, direction, script and technical side is appallingly amateurish.
The "spirit" of downtown NY that Hilly Kristal put forward and that the film producer's are trying to invoke was one where young artists could hone their skills and perform what they wanted trying to get to the next rung of success in their chosen fields.Everyone tried to better themselves with every performance.
Whether the production team wanted to play the story as a comedy, a tragedy, a musical, a comic book or whatever is irrelevant. It could have been any of these but whatever was in their minds they missed the boat by simply not doing it well. The film comes off as turgid, boring and confusing.They violated the primary premise of Hilly Kristal by messing up their craft so badly.
The participants and supporters of the film who prattled on about how historically correct it was going to be justify their many mistakes with the claim that "It's only a movie". Well any movie is "only a movie". So they want us to believe that CBGB The Movie is a light-hearted comedy and "only a movie"? It could have been but I don't think that many will find it even remotely funny except perhaps the people who are participants in the film and who are looking to gain some sort of supposed financial or career success out of it.
Please take the raves from audience reviewers with a grain of salt.
Please don't take my review or others by audience viewers too seriously either.There are far too many people who were creatively there at the time or who are fans of the real work that came out of the scene who dislike the film as much or more than I do. We are being termed "haters" by the film's participants. There are an awful lot of us "haters" out there then.
There are also a great deal of Stana, Rupert, etc. fan club members who along with the participants and misty eyed memorialising ex workers from the club who are skewering audience reviews the other way.
But in this case (which is rare) please do heed the warnings of the overwhelming majority of critics who really,really dislike this horribly crafted little film.
Disappointing and sad rather than uplifting and funny.
