It’s tougher to stay alive. Anyone can die, retire, the challenge is to keep on keepin’ on, with no compass, no rule book, knowing that everything you do thereafter could tarnish your legacy, kill your career. John Lennon, Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain were great artists, but if they were alive today, we’d see them differently.

Then there are those who never make it that far. Like Andy Wood.

You might be familiar with "Chloe Dancer/Crown Of Thorns" off the "Singles" soundtrack, but watching this movie Andy suddenly becomes three-dimensional, he lives. And we can see his pure desire to be a rock star, looking more like Michael Monroe than Eddie Vedder, having more in common with Bon Scott than anybody from Seattle. He was flash, he was performance, he got close but he got derailed by drugs. The best of us are damaged, and so was Andy Wood. There was something unknowable about him, that led to his demise. And when he OD’ed, it looked like opportunity had been snatched from Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament when they could finally smell it, when they were finally ready to prove themselves.

As for Mike McCready…he went to L.A. Paid to play at the Roxy to five people on a dead December night. And after parting with the $700 fee, he turned tail and went back to Seattle and gave up.

That’s the story of all successes. Giving up. If you haven’t been ready to hang it up you haven’t been hanging it out far enough. Success does happen overnight, after so much hard work you can’t even calculate the hourly pay, it’s too low.

But when Stone called Mike and then Eddie Vedder laid lyrics atop their musings with Jeff, Kurt Cobain was the new champion. Watching him here your jaw drops. Because we forget that Kurt was intelligent, and was nobody’s fool, he thought for himself, he wasn’t media-trained, he said what he felt, which wasn’t always politically correct. He castigated Pearl Jam, to the point where they constantly checked their behavior, wondering what Kurt would think.

And they all made peace before Kurt’s suicide, but then Pearl Jam was confronted with following up monster success, gracing the cover of "Time". They were still in the game, and it was anything but clear.

You want success, you dream of success, but you can’t handle it when it happens. It’s the carrot that keeps you motivated. When you get to the destination you partake of the fruits, do the drugs and screw the groupies, then you’re confronted with a giant emptiness, everybody’s so different but you haven’t changed.

Eddie Vedder is a cold character. He’s anything but warm and fuzzy. He’s not the one you’d call up to get a beer. You feel a distance. But it’s this distance that infuses his music with its power. He’s damaged, and he’s singing about it. And that part of us which is damaged too resonates.

We hear about the duplicity his "parents" foisted upon him, so his real father died without Eddie really knowing him. And wanting to get it so right in art, leave it all on stage, he became the poster boy for a grunge movement that Pearl Jam never said they were a member of. And he’s still trying to figure it out, all of Pearl Jam is still trying to figure it out.

The backstory comes late in the film. We see Jeff in Montana, talking about needing to get out. Dying to move to Seattle where you could see an offbeat film. Cable television and the Internet have lessened the isolation, but cyberspace is no substitute for the pulse of being with like-minded people, feeling at home.

And Cameron tells how the weather was so bad in Seattle that everybody stayed inside and played records and practiced. And a scene developed when no one was watching. The last hurrah before the boy bands, before Napster obliterated the landscape.

Actually, Pearl Jam is the perfect band for the streaming era. When it’s hard to quantify your success, when it’s all about fans as opposed to CDs.

And Pearl Jam’s got fans. They’re constantly asking themselves what the fans think.

And we get a twenty year review of history.

We’ve got Pearl Jam biting the hand that feeds it, decrying MTV. Which is startling when you realize everybody successful today is in on the joke, they want to live the private jet lifestyle, they want to leave their fans behind. Sure, the wannabes pledge fealty to the fans they don’t have, but anybody can promulgate a manifesto, few can execute it, because they’re not willing to march into the wilderness. If these men were not musicians they would not be working at Goldman Sachs, they’d be faceless blue collar workers. Our best artists are willing to put it all on the line, with no fallback position. Those yelling at the top of their lungs for attention today are just looking for a safe harbor, music is a means, not the end.

And then there’s the whole Ticketmaster controversy. The footage from the hearing is priceless, where Stone refuses to be cowered, he’s anything but polite, but what stands out most is no one took their side, not another band boycotted Ticketmaster. And for that they should be ashamed. If you’re not willing to stand up for what you believe in, if you say you have to play the game, you’re grist for the mill, you’ll be forgotten, no one can believe in you.

Not that the fans applaud everything Pearl Jam does. When the band plays "Bushleaguer" at the Nassau Coliseum they’re booed, but even though they feel threatened, they soldier on.

I’m not the biggest Pearl Jam fan. But after sitting through this movie, and be sure to watch it from beginning to end, it takes many twists and turns, not only did I respect them, believe they’re entitled to their place in the firmament, I gave them credit for surviving, for not breaking up, for continuing on, like the rest of us, trying to succeed, sometimes failing miserably, but getting back on their feet and playing again anyway.

You’ll see references to MTV, it feels like you’re in a time machine, visiting the past, and Sony is barely mentioned, and that’s fitting, because what lasts after all this time is the bands, the music, not the trappings.

And there’s one great moment when they play "The Singles" party on their only day off. Eddie has a melt-down, the band makes more enemies than friends. They learned that night that sometimes you have to say no.

That’s the legacy of Pearl Jam, no.

No videos.

No Ticketmaster

No expediency.

No rules.

You might not make music that sounds like theirs, but they paved a path for you, the same way Eddie’s beloved Who provided a beacon for Pearl Jam.

Yup, the band members say they’re paying homage to the seventies. They know their roots.

And the roots never change. The music must take priority. Practice comes before success. And making it looks nothing like you thought it would. And when you finally break through, you’re disoriented, no one gets it but you, everybody thinks your world is made.

But it’s only beginning.

Pearl Jam Twenty