Based on Lizzy Goodman’s book Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001-2011, this pleasing, rough-hewn documentary chronicles the New York music scene in the early years of this century.

In the months and years after 9/11, various hipsters and noiseniks emerged from basements and bedrooms. Interpol’s Paul Banks recalls self-financed tours of empty venues. Karen O, a painfully shy teen from New Jersey, transformed from a guitar-strumming wannabe into the charismatic frontwoman of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. James Murphy, a Pynchon-obsessed thirtysomething studio engineer, began crafting ageless floor-fillers in his Lower East Side apartment under the LCD Soundsystem banner. Adam Green and Kimya Dawson led an anti-folk charge as The Moldy Peaches. At the flashier, moneyed end of the postpunk spectrum, The Strokes, looking like people who could only ever be rock stars, sold almost two million copies of Is This It and pulled a reverse Beatles by becoming bigger than Jesus in the UK.

Taking a leaf from the Asif Kapadia playbook, the British film-makers Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace let the archival footage do the talking. So we get a heartfelt account of Karen O’s upbringing but little context on the other subjects or, indeed, the scene’s implosion as the effects grew of Rudy Giuliani’s cabaret laws, extreme gentrification, corporate demands and substance abuse.

The central thrust of Goodman’s book – great music, bad behaviour – often gets lost in blurry, hand-held videos. The ongoing rift between The Strokes and Ryan Adams requires more airing than it receives here. It is often argued that The Strokes are the last rock stars and that their Manhattan peers are the last great bohemians. It’s an Americentric view, but it’s gospel truth for this appealing if impressionistic time capsule.