I got the notice for this movie in my email and my curiosity instantly was alerted: “Before the End transcends “rock doc” in the same sense that Jim Morrison was more than a rock star. Featuring unprecedented content, from shocking corroboration about Morrison’s early life to harrowing revelations about his stardom and fresh evidence that contradicts his professed death, Before the End: Searching for Jim Morrison is proudly unauthorized because it “seeks the unvarnished truth.””

Jeff Finn has spent nearly forty years seeking out what the true story of Jim Morrison is, beyond the expected — the Oliver Stone movie that everyone saw in the 90s, Danny Sugerman’s No One Here Gets Out Alive that was part of the burnout starter pack in my hometown — and has gone more profound than, well, just about anyone else. He’s conducted more than a thousand interviews, more than a hundred on video, as he’s tried to figure out not just who we know who Jim Morrison is, but who he really was, from people who actually knew whoever he was at a specific moment of time, whether that’s family, high school friends, college roommates or film school classmates, Lovers, band mates, just about anyone who had a moment that they connected with Morrison, Finn has met them and learned something from them.

Where so many are content to move forward from Morrison’s birth — like how we never know what happened to Jesus from childhood to when he was an adult, a fact that has to delight Morrison, wherever he is, to no end — to the sex, drugs, rock and roll, public indecency and leather-clad Lizard Kill era of Morrison fronting The Doors. Yet Finn knows this is just part of the story and just one destination on a long midnight drive.

This doc came into my life at the right time, as I consider that I have aged past when I needed rock to tell my truth, or so adults would like me to believe. I worry for today’s youth that they will have no mysterious superstars to become obsessed about like I did in my teen years, devouring pre-internet conspiracy books about Morrison. Did he really die? Why did he use codenames like Mr. Mojo Rising? How many bands got some fame just by playing with the notion that Jim Morrison didn’t fade away? Those stories will take you down some excellent rabbit holes — Jim still has a photo ID on record at the Bank of America, he was a military MK Ultra experiment, and even he was a clone. Some of these stories strain your grasp of reality, but when the actual story is that he went to Paris and died, with no one seeing the body, how can you not expect mythology to fill in the gaps when reality is so sloppily constructed?

Told in three parts, each a little over an hour, Finn’s film has a strange impact on you. The more you listen to his deep voice, the longer you watch the interviews, and you start to follow him through the journeys down, as he says, the rabbit holes and the deeper warrens beyond those rabbit holes. By the time he introduces you to a source named “Mr. X,” who may or may not be Morrison — I don’t even know if the filmmaker is sure — you’ll be hooked. You may not become a true believer, but even if you walk away from this questioning the story about who Jim Morrison is — or was — he’s achieved his goal. It’s just as much reinventing the Jim that you believe you know and getting a more richly realized portrait of him as a human being, not just an artist. Someone who may have gone through childhood abuse, someone who moved often, someone who may have even been neurodivergent when we didn’t have the words yet to explain what that meant.

This has led me to consider who we all are. We all have a different story for each person we meet. The goal of any documentary is to inform you of a point of view, but it’s also to get you to think more critically. Before the End succeeds because it made me think of the idea that each person is only who every other person experiences them as. The difference here is that Morrison remains well-known years after his death. Supposed death, right? Each person here knew a moment in his life, and Finn knows all of their stories and the research he’s done for decades. What emerges is one of the richest pictures of Morrison I’ve seen in any media.

Before the End is streaming in the US, Canada, UK, and Australia on Amazon Prime Video, AppleTV, Google Play and YouTube TV. You can learn more at the official Facebook page.