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No Room for Rockstars, which chronicles the 2010 Vans Warped Tour, faced the seldom attempted, and typically unmet challenges set to all music documentaries. On the one hand, it is obliged to focus on the bands and organizers who make up the annual music and extreme sports festival, sating the fans who see the film for more of their favourite fare. On the other, it must combine hundreds of hours’ worth of concert footage into a cohesive, palatable story for those who know little of the tour.

The Warped Tour began in 1994, with a series of small punk and ska concerts. Over the next 17 years, the tour has grown into a behemoth two-month affair, with as many as 100 bands playing some of the dates. With size came bands with record deals and greater popular appeal, a push to sell merchandise, and a backlash from those who railed against the commercialization of music.

The ace up the sleeve of a film that would otherwise have surely been a Jackass epigone comes in the form of its producers and crew, many of whom have the quintessential Gen X documentary pedigrees. Agi Orsi and Stacy Peralta, in charge of production, were previously responsible for the excellent skating documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys (Peralta, who directed, was on the Zephyr skate team profiled in the film), while editor Joshua Altman had worked on the highly acclaimed We Live in Public, the morbidly gripping portrayal of the dawn of the Internet age. Rather than showing the highlights of the tour’s saturnalia, they chose to focus on how three artists see the Warped Tour and its gradual evolution.

Of these, the most popular and successful is Mike Posner. Posner, who never failed to sound as if he had just awoken from a thick stupor, is surprisingly industrious, following his Warped Tour sets with club performances and studio work. He made his pragmatism clear-although he was lucky to be making music for a paycheck, he readily admitted that he was a brand, and needed to sell himself while the iron was hot.

By contrast, Chris Drew, the painfully teenage frontman for Never Shout Never, reacted with asperity to the indelible undertow of business he encountered. Drew, who resembles a tattooed Justin Bieber and is fawned over by teenage girls, began playing music seriously when his parents threw him out of home. While lyrically clumsy, Drew is imbued with some measure of teenage pain and hope; I was struck by how candidly he spoke of his fear that the grind and money that dominates touring would leave him burned out.

The only band profiled that wasn’t part of the tour was Forever Came Calling, who try with adolescent tenacity to crawl and claw out of their small desert hometown by following the tour and selling records outside the venue to pay for their fuel. Broke and often nearing despair, their only goal is to get a chance to play on stage.

Unfortunately, while No Room for Rockstars is produced well, there is a dearth of necessary footage to tell the story. Honest insights into the life of a touring musician are quickly superseded by concert scenes, after which the camera must leap to another artist. Of course, a plethora of perspectives would have made for a worthwhile history of the Warped Tour. The personal approach the creators tried to take, however, held the unrealized promise of the rare amalgam of relatability and documentary that I’m still hoping to see.