Mike Shinoda and Emily Armstrong knocking it out of the Park, with Alex Farrell and Joe Hahn backing them up.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: In 2024 Linkin Park, the very first band that my son and I ever had in common, released From Zero — their first new album in seven years, after lead singer Chester Bennington’s suicide. I wrote in part:

Mike Shinoda finally felt ready to record a revival with his bandmates, along with a new drummer (music-biz veteran Colin Brittain) and new co-vocalist Emily Armstrong, who reaches Bennington’s octave range (cf. her belt-sander’d screams in the needlessly acroynmized “IGYEIH”) and does her part for the legacy…the band dusts off their stacks and recaptures the first two albums’ nü-metal glory days with quiet-loud-quiet showcases like “The Emptiness Machine” and “Heavy is the Crown”, though their two favorite topics remain self-aware primal-scream sessions and tirades toward unnamed offenders who suck. With the band-reset button firmly pressed, the question of where LP goes from here — i.e, venturing into new ideas or rewriting the same single every few years, like Skillet — remains To Be Continued for now.

After recently wrapping up a two-year world tour, their story continues with Linkin Park: Unshatter, a documentary that’s been rolled out as a specialty theatrical release with limited showtimes and no AMC Premiere savings allowed. It isn’t a Behind the Music episode surveying their entire history for the uninitiated — more of a From Zero making-of, charting their gradual emergence from the throes of grief and rage to figure out what comes next. (Quoth the familiar lyric on the movie’s poster: “The hardest part of ending is starting again.”) At 54 it was my first time ever seeing a concert film in theaters, or anything like one because my favorite bands never make them.

The Gist: The concert selected here — a sold-out show at the Allianz Parque stadium in São Paulo, Brazil, which seats 50,000 and was just renamed this past May — serves as a framing sequence for the doc’s full runtime. The rest of Unshatter captures a band in dormancy, in doubt about whether they can rediscover the old magic five years after Bennington’s death. Surviving bandleader Mike Shinoda, bassist Alex “Phoenix” Farrell, and programmer/keyboardist Joe Hahn (who also directed this film) reconnect in 2022 and mull over the possibility of making music again. The agenda isn’t necessarily resurrecting LP per se — at first they’re just scratching an itch to collaborate again, even if it might mean changing their name or settling for smaller venues or lower festival billings or whatever. They just want to get back to making music.

The jagged path forward is slow and tentative as the trio works through their reservations and eases back into things by playing with a variety of other musicians just to see how it feels, not exactly as a recruitment drive (in much the same way that, as Shinoda aptly analogizes it, no one goes to a bar and announces they’re looking for a wife). Along the way, they click with two personalities in particular: new drummer Colin Brittain, a prolific producer in his own right who also plays a mean guitar; and singer Emily Armstrong, whose range and screams are pretty close to Bennington’s — fortuitous since, again, they weren’t searching for his clone. Months of back-and-forth ensue, Armstrong’s formidable talents are put to the test, and quite possibly some of the stresses along the way are kept offscreen. Among the biggest compromises we’re allowed to witness: lead guitarist Brad Delson is last to sign on for new LP songs, but has zero interest in performing on stage again.

Will they figure it out? Well, yeah. Obviously the São Paulo concert is a spoiler, not to mention that “new album” thing I mentioned like five minutes ago. It’s about the journey, not the suspense.

The familiar faces: Celebrity cameos are next to nonexistent. Blink-182s’s Mark Hoppus, a longtime friend of the band — who looks so, so much older now — drops by the studio to listen to their work-in-progress and pay compliments.

The Impressions: The experience was worth it just for the chance to hear LP on a sound system vastly superior to my home devices, and without my typical in-person concert experience of standing too closely to the speakers so all the instruments are cement-mixed into sludge and give me tinnitus for the next 24-36 hours. Longtime fans should recognize nearly every song, though most of them are truncated excerpts. An assortment of instrumental bridges from their catalog also serve as the score in between performance snippets. Only three numbers are presented in their entirety before the end credits: “The Catalyst” (whose Act 3 gets a gloriously bombastic upgrade), “In the End” (the audience sings most of it for them), and the head-banging joy of “Bleed It Out”, which closes out the concert and the film with tens of thousands of WE-ARE-SO-BACK-BABY fist-pumps and over-the-top pyrotechnics.

Meanwhile behind the scenes, the road to recovery and reunion is sometimes painful to watch. I don’t mean tears, though there’re a few: the “candid” footage in the first half is awkward and stilted, as if everyone’s often holding back how they really feel. Maybe there’re lingering sensitivities that are none of our business, or maybe it’s an uncomfortable awareness of all these cameras that hadn’t followed them around in years. No one starts a sentence with “To speak my truth…” but they’re definitely being diplomatic to such a degree that one wonders if there’re lawyers or therapists eavesdropping in the next room. Like many a musician’s making-of featurettes, Unshatter isn’t casually warts-and-all: they’re only sharing with us to a limited extent.

Also missing from this movie:

• Video of any other musicians they played with during the reformative process.
• Original drummer Rob Bourdon, who declined to return after the hiatus and appears only in a brief archival montage.
• Any mention whatsoever of Armstrong’s past controversies, which she partly, curtly responded to a while back.

Thankfully everyone loosens up as time moves on, as the band feels comfortable around each other again, and as the newcomers acclimate to their new found-family. Brittain in particular is so simpatico and relaxed, for a while I forgot he wasn’t a co-founder. One short segment resolves the Delson subplot by kindly introducing us to new touring guitarist Alex Feder (a session player for several Top-40 singers and erstwhile leader of his own 2000s band The XYZ Affair), and one or two other compatriots pop in here and there.

The From Zero pre-release fervor ramps up with their big live-streaming event on September 5, 2024, which has the historical significance of being one of the extremely few live-streaming events I’ve ever caught actually live as it happened in my entire life. The world got to hear them with Armstrong for the first time as they opened with the thundering first single “The Emptiness Machine”. The movie replays only part of it, dubs Armstrong’s commentary over some of Shinoda’s first section, and suffocates the needle-dropping with a parade of YouTubers’ reaction videos. Now I’m even gladder I caught it the first time around, uncut and squee-free.

Amid the process toward catharsis, Bennington’s ghost looms quietly above all, but they go understandably light on the name-checking and keep the emphasis on forward motion. One significant exception is allowed over the first minute of the end credits: an old home movie of the band jamming in someone’s living room, with Bennington screaming and bouncing and so very young. It’s one last lump in the throat from the overall bittersweetness of Unshatter‘s tragedy-to-recovery arc.

Viewers who aren’t already LP fans will be pretty much lost, unless maybe they’re America’s Got Talent fans who saw the band’s appearance on that show a couple months ago and are now looking for a sampler. Many of their social media followers (e.g., my son) have already seen and/or heard some of these performances online, but this is their first chance to complete the full Unshatter film experience, preferably with a theater full of others who get it. A few dozen of us were in the house Saturday afternoon and were very much into it, including one dad in an LP shirt who’d brought his two sons along. Déjà vu.

The end credits? To answer the burning question that MCC is always happy to verify: yes, there is indeed a scene after the Linkin Park: Unshatter end credits, whose persons of interest include dozens of camerapeople and every YouTuber in the live-stream montage. The scroll-along songs are “Unshatter” (off From Zero‘s 2025 deluxe edition I don’t have, so I’d never heard it before) and the instrumental “Points of Authority”.

After the credits, at the very end is one last behind-the-scenes moment with all six members in the studio once more, listening to searing new guitar tracks, bopping along in their own giddy ways, smiling and laughing together like old times, except now it’s new times for all.