One of the must-see documentaries at MoMA’s Doc Fortnight festival was Nova ’78.

My review ran in The Playlist:

Backstage at the Nova Convention, a three-day gathering in late 1978 ostensibly to celebrate the work of William S. Burroughs, an organizer worries that audience members will be upset by the news that Keith Richards has cancelled, as rock stars do. About to mount the stage, Patti Smith agrees to deliver the bad news, saying with the grinning nonchalance of a bohemian gunslinger (or neo-punk Bob Dylan), “if they’re going to give anybody shit, let them try to give me shit.” It’s a barely buffed-up little diamond of a moment in Aaron Brookner and Rodrigo Areias’ “Nova ’78,” a gratifyingly non-exhaustive documentary filled with them…