In 2017, I visited a mid-budget hotel near the Mall Of America in suburban Minneapolis to interview Mitski for my podcast. The night before, I watched her play a sold-out show at a local rock club. She was, at the time, a critical favorite just starting to become indie-famous. Her most recent album, Puberty 2, made year-end lists but didn’t top them. I was a fan, though I wouldn’t have predicted the path her career would eventually take. She was just a really good artist, I thought, not necessarily a budding pop superstar.
For about a half hour, we talked in her hotel room while her band was off riding the mall’s indoor roller coaster. Two things were immediately apparent: She was one of the most self-possessed musicians I’d ever met, and she was determined to not go along with the crowd. “I have a hard time joining scenes, like music scenes or art scenes,” she told me. “I have a better time collecting friends that I connect with on an individual level and just created my own spread-out community.”
I thought about that interview while watching Mitski: The Land, a new concert movie set to screen exclusively in theaters nationwide on Wednesday. It was impossible not to notice how far she’s come: The Land was filmed over three nights in 2024 at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta, during the tour in support of her most recent album, 2023’s stunning The Land Is Inhospitable And So Are We. That record features “My Love Mine All Mine,” the viral hit that has streamed more than 1.7 billion times on Spotify and exposed Mitski to a much different (and younger) audience than the millennial indie fans who populated that Minneapolis gig eight years ago. This is evidenced early in The Land, when Mitski stops to thank the parents in attendance for escorting their kids to the show, after which she gently addresses the rest of the audience in a cadence best described as “Ms. Rachel goes to art school.”
And then there’s the prescient substance of our interview, particularly the part about being her own island. That’s precisely what she is in The Land — dressed simply in black slacks and white top, she moves about a starkly decorated stage alone, with members of her excellent seven-piece band situated on the outer edges. On film, director Grant James takes a cue from Andi Watson’s minimalist stage design by emphasizing Mitski’s singularity, framing her at a remove from the audience and her fellow musicians. She is, in almost every shot, holding all our attention; When James cuts to the band, he keeps her out of the frame. Otherwise, Mitski’s most prominent on-screen co-stars are the two chairs she deploys as props at center stage.
It’s a fascinating contrast with the biggest concert film of the decade, 2023’s Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour. That movie is designed to show off the enormity of the subject’s fame, with endless sweeping overhead stadium shots where tens of thousands of delirious Swifties genuflect at the altar of Taylor. It is meant to be a worshipful monument to Taylor Swift As One-Woman Monoculture, a representation of Pop Fandom As Community. But Mitski, as she said, is a woman apart. In The Land, she’s building a world, her own world. And she’s inviting you to watch her move through that world. Though, importantly, she doesn’t necessarily extend that invitation to join her there.
Thankfully, watching Mitski is more than enough. She has become, years after playing rock clubs and staying at mid-budget hotels on the edge of town, the rare indie star who has earned the big-screen treatment.
Back when we spoke in the late 2010s, Mitski admitted she was still learning how to be a performer. Like many other indie breakouts at the time, she was part of the so-called Bandcamp Generation that became popular online as bedroom-pop artists and then formed bands to play live once there was enough demand for them to tour. It was an inverse of the old “tour until you get signed” model that became a necessity as the economics of the music industry turned against independent artists.
Most of those acts never became truly great live performers. (I recall in that era sitting through many dispiritingly boring live gigs by artists whose albums I really liked.) Mitski, however, was dutiful about paying her dues. In our interview, she told me about playing “really shitty places in New York City three times a week, just to perform to people who don’t want to hear me. Just old guys who look like Bukowski who want me to shut up or be a jukebox.”
You can see and hear the dividends of those efforts in The Land, which documents Mitski’s confident transformation into one of the most theatrical (and occasionally bonkers) on-stage presences in contemporary music. Throughout the film, we see her acting out songs with a mix of pantomime and Jazzercise-style kicks and air-punches. Working with the choreographer Monica Mirabile, Mitski isn’t what I would call a “great” dancer. But she is a transfixing — and delectably odd — mover and shaker, which might actually be better in this context. Watching her gesticulate throughout the 21-song set re-enforced in my mind Mitski’s separation from all the other artists of her generation, who for the most part tend to hide behind guitars and pianos on-stage. Few have the conviction to be a magnificent weirdo for the sake of art like she does. In The Land she is, truly, a person without fear. Which means her peers aren’t contemporary but historical — specifically, the three B’s of old-school eccentric avant-pop (Bowie, Byrne, and Bush). On stage, Mitski has officially assumed her place in that lineage.
When I reviewed The Land Is Inhospitable, I concluded that the album’s dreamy country-rock soundscapes didn’t sound like the work of an artist courting a large audience. Instead, the music was “situated in a strange, shadowy environment that exists strictly in the singer’s imagination.” Turns out I was half right about that. Like Stop Making Sense meets Twin Peaks: The Return, Mitski’s concert film certainly presents a strange and shadowy cinematic experience. But that strange and shadowy quality is precisely what has made Mitski such a big star, which The Land documents just as surely as the Eras film captured Taylor Swift’s ubiquity.
Like all the most memorable concert movies, The Land functions as a kind of capstone. For Mitski, it may very well be the definitive encapsulation of her career up to now, given the catalog-spanning setlist — that, interestingly, leaves off “Your Best American Girl,” the most famous song of her “early” period — and the peak-of-her-powers command of the audience. Where she goes after this is anyone’s guess. But whatever direction she chooses will be entirely her own, no doubt.
