The Last Criticis one of the year’s most fascinating rock documentaries — even though it’s not about a musician. It’s a portrait of the legendary writer Robert Christgau, the self-proclaimed “Dean of American Rock Critics.” He was one of the pioneers
who invented pop-music criticism in the Sixties — but six decades later, at 83, he’s still at the top of the game. He began his Consumer Guide column in the Village Voice in 1969, and has kept cranking it out ever since, now on Substack. For generations of music fanatics, Christgau’s voice hits like Bob Dylan or Neil Young — two artists his age who are still doing it with the same fiercely independent spirit he brings to his writing.
The debut feature from director Matty Wishnow, The Last Criticwon the jury prize at the South by Southwest and Oak Cliff Film festivals, as well as the 2026 Screen Dallas grand prize. It gets its New York premiere tomorrow. The film, which is co-produced by longtime Rolling Stone contributor and editor Joe Levy, goes beyond music, because it’s also the portrait of a marriage. Christgau and his wife, novelist Carola Dibbell, have been together more than 50 years. Over the decades, they’ve shared an intellectual life, raised their daughter, collected way too much vinyl, and — the weirdest part — remained crazy in love.
Christgau has a fearsome rep for never pulling his punches, with his own savage wit. Lou Reed spent a chunk of his live album Take No Prisonerscomplaining about getting a B+ grade for Street Hassle; when U2 won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1988 for The Joshua Tree, Bono jokily groused in his speech about his band’s reviews in the Village Voice. Christgau’s inspired more songs attacking him than any other journalist, from Sonic Youth (“Kill Yr Idols”) to Public Enemy (“Bring the Noise”).
But there’s something obsessive about his lifelong quest to chronicle the music, still going strong after 60 years — he’s heard more albums than anyone on the planet. When he reviewed Prince’s Dirty Mind in 1980, he dropped one of the most-quoted one-liners in critical history: “Mick Jagger can fold up his penis and go home.”
The Last Critic features artists Christgau has reviewed, as well as writers he’s inspired, from Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore to Pulitzer-winning novelist Colson Whitehead. (I make an appearance as well.) There’s a touching interlude with his lifelong friend Greil Marcus, the only other OG rock critic who’s kept doing it this long (or this well). In one of the most surprising moments, the legendary songwriter Randy Newman recalls their friendship, and admits he wrote a song about Christgau and Dibbell, “Lost Without You,” inspired by the closeness of their marriage. It’s the kind of movie where you come for the rock, stay for the romance.
Rolling Stone met up with the couple at the same East Village pad they’ve called home for 50 years. The place is packed with albums, books, art — the first thing that greets you at the door is a painting of the Shirelles. They talked about the doc, seeing their marriage up on the big screen, the art of arguing, playing hoops with Randy Newman, and the strange college semester when Christgau was Gene Simmons’ professor.
Congratulations on the movie.
Robert Christgau: It came out really well. When [director] Matty [Wishlow] called me up and asked if I would do it, the first thing I said was, “Yes, if you include my marriage,” which at the time I think took him aback. However, he came to feel that it was the marriage that made the movie, which is what I believe.
It is the marriage that makes the movie.
Carola Dibbell: But it’s still about you. I’m a co-star.
When I first saw it, I told the director, “This is a love story. A very strange love story.”
Christgau: Well, I agree. I think that’s the best thing about the movie. The relationship really has a kind of vitality to it that you can see. And that’s exactly how I feel about Carola, and that’s the most important thing in my life. And it’s really nice that it actually comes through in the imagery of the film. I think that’s the reason people like the movie, too.
Dibbell: It’s the combination.
When did you two get together?
Dibbell: The summer of 1972. Bob and I had known each other. He was my friend Dominique’s boyfriend. Bob had had his eye on me all this time, but I was just so delighted to have him as a friend. I knew that he was a rock critic, but I really was not like a groupie. I met him in the summer of 1970 — we were all having breakfast at Ratner’s Deli. But I then got into an argument with you about Godard.
Christgau: She knew more about film than I did.
Dibbell: Bob and I had a big argument about it, but then we became friends anyway, and then he began to date Dominique, and so we just knew each other. But eventually, everything changed for me.
Christgau: I’m so glad it did, Carola. She was an incredibly cute woman with a Radcliffe degree.
Dibbell: The thing is we were both English majors. One night we were playing a party game called “Celebrity,” and we needed to come up with a celebrity whose initials were an M and a C. And we both came up with Martin Chuzzlewit [the title character in an 1844 Dickens novel].
Now that’s two people destined to be together. I think that’s why people respond seeing such an unusual couple onscreen.
Christgau: What makes it so unusual?
Two people, very extreme personalities, who stay madly in love for 50 years of marriage, but remain individuals in a totally unfiltered way.
Christgau: I don’t know how extreme I think we are, but—
Dibbell: You’re pretty extreme.
Christgau: You’re one to talk.
Dibbell: Really? I really don’t know that, but I believe you.
You both make a strong impression. Let me put it that way.
Dibbell: Well, at the time that we got together, it was … I’m not going to say “turning point,” but it was sort of a point where one chapter in the counterculture and the movement was easing into another. People were asking, “Oh, is it OK to be a feminist and get married?” Bob was a feminist too, and he always liked smart women. And so we both were trying to figure out, how do you do this? A marriage of equals?
Something I love about the documentary is how it captures your enthusiasm for the art of a good argument.
Dibbell: I used to say that if I told him “I agree with you,” he’d say, “That’s where you’re wrong.” He just couldn’t stop arguing.
Christgau: Me?
Dibbell: Yeah, you. Who do you think we’re talking about? But it just comes very easily to both of us.
Would it be fair to say that you both have argumentative personalities?
Christgau: I don’t think Carola has an argumentative personality.
Dibbell: There’s where I disagree with you.
I guess I mean a “debate” more than an “argument.”
Dibbell: I think I argue more than I debate, actually. But it definitely improves our thought to be arguing together.
Christgau: I got Carola to start writing rock criticism, not because she was my wife and I wanted to give her the work — although, obviously, that was part of it. But because A, I knew she could really write, and B, she had knowledge of the subject.
Dibbell: I found rock criticism so interesting as a form, being a writer, and I was very interested in the unreliable narrator and all that kind of thing. Then when I read Lester Bangs, I said, “Oh, yeah! Why not be literally ambitious while writing about this declassé music stuff?”
Christgau: He could also write a paragraph in about a minute and a half.
When you began writing in the Sixties, there wasn’t a lot of serious attention paid to pop music.
Christgau: But Rolling Stone was doing that a lot. Rolling Stone was a crucial part of why all of that happened. Jann Wenner had a head for finding the most interesting writers, many from the Boston college scene, and that was a really important factor in why I got to do what I did. No question about it.
And also the fact that I was already friends with Greil Marcus. That was a crucial part of it as well. He was at Rolling Stone, and frankly, I think he had Jann Wenner around his little finger. Because Jann was smart enough to know that this guy was really something else.
Early on, you wrote that your biggest influences were Thelonius Monk and Alan Freed.
Christgau: Let me tell you, Monk has lasted. I still play a lot of Thelonious Monk. Carola gets a little tired of it.
Dibbell: I finally say, “Can we listen to The Clash?”
But you always had an appreciation for AM radio. You were open to tawdry pop trash.
Christgau: It wasn’t “tawdry.” Come on.
But you love the tawdry.
Christgau: I don’t agree with that.
You were writing in the Seventies about how great KC and the Sunshine Band were. In the Village Voice.
Christgau: It’s all well-made, that’s the thing. Extremely well-made. That proves my point.
Dibbell: It proves your point.
Determined as you are to undermine the entire premise of my point, I’m going to make it anyway. When I first read your Consumer Guide as a kid in the Eighties, I couldn’t believe there was an adult writing about Funkadelic and the Go-Go’s and Donna Summer and A Flock of Seagulls and taking it seriously, as art.
Christgau: Four hours a day listening to AM radio had something to do with that. But I wanted to write about pop art as an important phenomenon.
There’s a great story in your memoir about when you were teaching the rock criticism class at CUNY on Staten Island in 1970, and one of your students was a kid named Gene Klein.
Christgau: Who later became Gene Simmons.
I always wonder what the dragon from Kiss learned from you about music critics.
Christgau: He just sat in the back and kept his mouth shut.
Something The Last Critic documents is your insanely obsessive online following, around the world.
Christgau: One thing that happens with this movie is people in Sweden and Norway coming up with their dog-eared copies of my books.
Dibbell: It was so funny hearing about Europeans with tattered versions of the first Consumer Guide book.
Christgau: So I had this fanbase all over the world, and I had no idea it was there, really. I was writing for the Village Voice, and they paid me decently, and I had a lot of autonomy, and I really valued it. But when that ended, I kept writing. I managed to have a whole life as a critic, and it’s not like I’m working for Variety or the Times. I feel not just fortunate, I feel like I built something.
Dibbell: But there was a point when you were having conversations about whether you should stick with the Consumer Guide or whether you should write more essays. Also, I remember I had to argue Bob into writing the memoir, Going Into the City. You felt, “Why would anybody want to read my story?”
Christgau: Which came out pretty well, I think.
Dibbell: Yeah, it did. But you resisted that. Editors thought you should write more essays, but I felt that the Consumer Guide was such a great form that you shouldn’t stop doing it. And I also understood that you had a fanbase based on that. I wasn’t even thinking so you can make a living — but just with me, my constant struggle to get a book published, I just felt this is a great thing, that fanbase. You’re very lucky that people want to be your fan.
How did you become friends with Randy Newman? He plays such a surprising role in the movie.
Dibbell: He was lovely.
Randy Newman talks about writing a beautiful love song about you two, “Lost Without You.”
Christgau: I will say I was very proud. I wrote about Randy in the very beginning, and I felt that Randy really did understand that I got him. I was early on it. I was initially assigned by this guy from BMI named Russ Sanchez when I was writing for the BMI magazine who told me about this songwriter guy named Randy Newman who they wanted to have a piece on. At that time he lived in a house somewhere in the Valley, so I went there and I interviewed him. And then we went out to the ballpark and played basketball. This was a long time ago — I don’t play basketball anymore. But we had a game of basketball.
Dibbell: Don’t you each remember that the other one won?
Christgau: I think he won.
Dibbell: He thinks you won.
Christgau: Well, he was taller than me. But I do rebound with a certain amount of verve.
It started with basketball, but how did that turn into a long-running friendship?
Dibbell: He wrote you a fan letter in the Nineties, saying that he admired your perseverance, the way you kept up with new music, that it was something he did not actually understand, your enthusiasm for it. But he was interested in hip-hop and he wanted you to guide him. He wanted you to recommend him some hip-hop.
What did you play him?
Dibbell: Public Enemy, I think.
Christgau: I’ve always had a high opinion of him.
Dibbell: We had lunch with him — this was in the old days when we had an answering machine. We got a message from someone claiming to be Randy Newman, and I said, “Oh, it’s not Randy Newman.” But you got back to him and said, “Was that you?” And he said, “Yes.” You were both old by then.
Christgau: We went to lunch. Then he came back to our place, even though he could hardly walk.
Dibbell: He had some bad knee problem, but you wanted to play him some new music. He climbed the stairs. Then he looked around our apartment, and he said, “If you wanted to fix this place up, I could loan you some money.”
He’s so sincere in this movie — we’ve never seen this side of him before. It’s probably the only Randy Newman song anyone would want to be about them.
Christgau: Yeah, it’s a great compliment. I liked that song before I knew it was about us.
Were you surprised by The Last Critic, when you finally saw it?
Christgau: I think a better way of putting it is that I was more pleased by it than I anticipated being. And I was especially happy about how important a role Carola played in it. Matty hadn’t made a movie before. This was not his area of expertise. But he ended up making a really good movie.
It just seemed like, “OK, you want to do this? What do you see in a documentary about a critic?”
But it goes beyond that. It’s the love story, in a collaborative life of the mind.
Christgau: That is the thing that I like best about it, and I’m proud of it. Obviously, I’m very happy who it was a love story with. If it had been about [the legendary New Yorker and Village Voice journalist] Ellen Willis [his Sixties ex] and me, it wouldn’t have been this good. Ellen’s as smart as anybody I’ve ever met. But Ellen didn’t like music as much as Carola ended up doing. [Dibbell comes in from the next room.] I was just saying you were a better rock critic than Ellen Willis.
Dibbell: I respect her tremendously. Her work was foundational.
You were on the scene for so many pivotal rock moments, like the Monterey Pop festival and Woodstock. A fan on your Substack recently found a photo of you in the crowd at Monterey.
Christgau: About the third row, yeah. Nobody at that time understood how important Monterey was going to turn out to be historically, as this event that really just pretended something was happening — but then it really happened. Woodstock itself was a strange and interesting experience, which involved a lot of lying around the grass, among other things.
The way you wrote about women musicians in the 1970s was very ahead of the curve culturally. You were engaging with feminist ideas at a time when it was rare in music journalism. There’s a really moving moment in the doc when the writer Jessica Hopper discusses reading your words on Joni Mitchell.
Christgau: Let it be said that Ellen Willis was not without her presence in that fact, because Ellen Willis really made me a much more fervent and conscience-driven and militant feminist. It was really important to me to be a feminist critic. I mean, I had those impulses anyway, but Willis obviously solidified them, without any question. I’ve been writing about women making rock & roll since the beginning. Joy of Cooking and Fanny are bands that 90 percent of people have never heard of.
You were taking Dolly Parton seriously as a writer in the 1970s, when most of the media treated her as a joke.
Christgau: But Patti Smith was out there covering “Jolene,” right? Glad she’s still around. How old is Patti?
Dibbell: She’s a little younger than us, but not that much younger than us. So, what, she’s in her seventies?
She turns 80 in December.
Dibbell: And Debbie Harry? I think she’s older than me.
You had a great line about a Billy Joel album in the Eighties: “Sexual-politics rads like me were fretting about a decade ago come home to haunt guys who thought they were a crock.”
Christgau: I said that? That’s pretty good. But as far as my marriage with Carola is concerned, one thing that’s really significant about how it happened is that I went out with one of her best friends, for close to a year before. And so Carola was someone I really knew fairly well, but it wasn’t like we were dating.
Dibbell: Not even a little bit. I was really not ready to get married again in that time. I’d been married before — I got married on my way to get divorced. I was not ready for a potential husband, so I was very happy to know Bob as a friend.
As you said before, you were figuring out a new way of doing this — a marriage of equals.
Dibbell: Well, I had to figure out how to be heard, when you were surrounded by people who were just going to listen to you. I had to figure out how to do that. Despite all the struggling to be an equal and all that, I do spend a lot of time feeling like Bob is doing what he’s doing, and I’m helping make it work. But at the same time, I mean, when I finally published a novel [The Other Ones, in 2014] and had readings and did events as myself, it was very different. And Bob was great. He came as my date on an event I did at Rochester [New York]. He said “I love being the date. I love not having to do the work.”
Some of the best moments in the doc are just you two geeking out about music together.
Christgau: There was an emotional weight to it that most documentaries about critics wouldn’t have. I just understood that the marriage was integral to the fact that I did this work, and therefore it had to be there.
Dibbell: I believe Bob when he says that, but I don’t necessarily experience it that way. I mean, I rarely talk you out of an opinion about a record.
Christgau: You’re probably right.
Dibbell: I mean, I really was amazed by how much of this movie was about work, judgment, criticism. So there are all these shots where he’s writing at his computer, with all these piles of books collapsing around him. And he’s sitting there thinking, “Is this an A or an A-minus?” But one of my favorite scenes is when I’m editing Bob. Just because it seemed so relaxed and there were so many things we agreed about without really having to spell them out. And I like that. I like that a lot.
I’m just so used to this setup — our marriage, how we interact with each other — I don’t even think about how it works. There’s just so much that we share. I’m so used to it.
Christgau: After half a century, I would hope you’re used to it.
Dibbell: Yeah — that’s how that works.
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