Bon Jovi, Forever Young, Comes Face-to-Face With Mortality in ‘Thank You, Good Night’
You can’t watch Thank You, Good Night: The Bon Jovi Story and walk away with anything but respect for Jon Bon Jovi. The four-part, nearly five-hour documentary about the singer-songwriter and his namesake New Jersey rock band (streaming now on Hulu) unflinchingly addresses the vocal problems that plagued Bon Jovi’s 2022 tour. If you’ve seen the YouTube videos of him struggling through “You Give Love a Bad Name” or “Wanted Dead or Alive,” you know how brutal it was to hear.
Bon Jovi does too. In one scene, he walks offstage after a concert in Indianapolis and collapses on the rug in his dressing room. “By far the worst show,” he mutters.
It’s the frontman’s failing voice — the result of an atrophying vocal cord — and his relentless mission to fix it that drives director Gotham Chopra’s stellar portrait. Yes, Thank You, Good Night is a rock doc charting the group’s evolution from Jersey bar band to Eighties pop-metal fame and beyond, but it’s not hagiography. Along with the humbling vocal issue narrative, the docuseries doesn’t shy away from awkward subjects, including the group’s lack of critical support and how it tweaked Bon Jovi’s ego — this very magazine reviewed their 1986 blockbuster Slippery When Wet as a “smudgy Xerox of Quiet Riot.” The drug charges against former manager Doc McGhee, who conscripted the band to perform a benefit show in the Soviet Union to keep him out of jail, are also detailed, as is the excessive drinking of members that nearly led to a breakup.
In a coup for Chopra, original guitarist Richie Sambora, who abruptly left the band during a tour in 2013, resurfaces to tell his side of the story. Sambora and Bon Jovi haven’t spoken in years — “Not for lack of fucking trying!” the singer says at one point — and his exit from the group still stings Bon Jovi. For his part, Sambora uses his appearance to apologize to the fans and to his bandmates for his Irish exit but doesn’t regret quitting. “I regret how I did it,” he says.
The film’s dissection of the Bon Jovi/Sambora dynamic will delight longtime fans of the band, and vintage footage of the twosome during the group’s early days and in their acoustic appearance on the 1989 MTV Video Music Awards reminds you how electrifying their onstage chemistry was, especially as singers. In one segment, Bon Jovi is shown listening to the isolated vocal tracks of “Livin’ on a Prayer” with longtime engineer Obie O’Brien. “I don’t think that’s been replaced,” he says later of he and Sambora’s musical interplay.
Nearly all past and present members sit for interviews, from gruff drummer Tico Torres and gregarious keys man David Bryan to Sambora’s replacement, Canadian shredder Phil X, and bassist Hugh McDonald. (Founding bass player Alec John Such, who died in 2022, is seen in archival clips.) Bruce Springsteen, one of Bon Jovi’s chief influences when he led his first band, the Atlantic City Expressway, also appears, and we learn that the two Garden State heroes often take 100-mile drives together, without their phones, to talk about music and mortality.
Bon Jovi, once forever young, is staring down mortality: He’s 62, wears his signature hair proudly gray, and is reckoning with what could be the end of his career. Despite having vocal cord surgery in June 2022 and committing himself to daily singing exercises and treatments — Chopra’s camera follows him through all of it — there’s no guarantee that Bon Jovi will tour again. He sang at the Grammy event honoring him as MusiCares Person of the Year earlier this year and will release a new album, Forever, in June, but the perfection he requires of himself onstage may tragically elude him.
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member says he’s at peace with that potential outcome. That’s hard to believe, however, of a man who was born for the stage.
“I don’t have a messiah complex…,” Bon Jovi says in one interview, before his voice trails off and he chokes back tears. “Anyway, that’s why the legacy matters.”
In the end, Thank You, Good Night is a story about how you react when the very thing that makes you who you are begins to let you down. Such a change is a jarring, physical eye-opener, and also a crisis of conscience. But as Bon Jovi himself wrote, sometimes you’ve gotta keep the faith.