Chuck Berry: Hail! Hail! Rock 'N' Roll (2006)

The new four-disc version of Taylor Hackford's Chuck Berry documentary is a massive expansion of the original release. When it opened theatrically, Hail! Hail! Rock 'N' Roll was primarily a concert film extolling Berry's music, supplemented by interviews with the genre's first great singer-songwriter and those he influenced. Now more than seven hours of never-seen interviews have been added, with people like Jerry Lee Lewis, the late Roy Orbison, and Atlantic Records cofounder Ahmet Ertegun. Among the abundant extras is a beautifully calm sequence in which The Band's Robbie Robertson goes through Berry's scrapbook with him, discussing yellowed, amazing items like a telegram from someone in Elvis Presley's camp asking Berry to write a song for the King.

In Lewis' characteristically bumptious interview (''I'm hurtless! You couldn't hurt me if you hurt me!''), he cuts to the heart of it when he says that Berry is ''the Hank Williams of rock & roll.'' Exactly: In the sense that he was the first hit-maker in his genre to both write and perform all of his major works, Berry is unique. Nearly everyone in Hail! Hail! marvels at Berry's vividly colloquial lyrics — ''the way they stabbed, the way they cut,'' in Orbison's striking phrase — the precise, witty travelogues of American fun and passion like ''Maybellene,'' ''Johnny B. Goode,'' ''No Particular Place to Go,'' and others. This, combined with the guitar riffs and stage moves he invented, made him the compleat rock & roller, and in '86, pushing 60, he could still croon, charm, and duckwalk like nobody's business.

He could also throw up walls of prideful arrogance. The concert was a celebration of Berry's birthday in his hometown of St. Louis, with an all-star band fronted by no less than Keith Richards in a powder blue tuxedo jacket, with whom Berry had provoked more than one heated rehearsal argument over song arrangements. Parts of the show are mediocre — Linda Ronstadt belting out a hapless version of Berry's ''Back in the U.S.A.,'' for example — but the meat of Hackford's production was always the rehearsal and interview footage, during which we're made privy to Berry's demand for lucre as well as perfection and respect. (He refuses to begin filming until he's handed a bag of cash — the manner in which Berry has long conducted his concert negotiations.)

The result, finally, is a double portrait: of, as Hackford puts it, ''a very conflicted genius who gave us a lot of trouble,'' and of a dedicated, protean genius who has given us art and pleasure that is never-ending. Even after lo its many hours, you'll likely wish this DVD set never ended, either.

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