JAMES aren’t pretending they’ve lived a tidy rock’n’roll life in Getting Away With It – a documentary subtitled Sects, Trance and Rock’n’Roll that digs into the band’s long list of near misses, wrong turns and improbable survival skills.

The film rewinds to an origin story straight out of a student-night comedy: future singer Tim Booth, described as middle-class and boarding school-educated, crosses paths with a working-class band of “borderline hooligans” after they sneak into the University of Manchester student union bar and nick his drinks.

From there, the decisions get even more James. Their manager calls them “a band that took all the wrong turns and made every mistake possible”, and the documentary runs with it: they turned down Factory Records’ offer to put out a first album because they didn’t want a product number attached. Then they also passed on a support slot on the Smiths’ US tour – because half the group had joined an esoteric meditation cult, and the dates would’ve clashed with the bassist’s pursuit of enlightenment.

The film also leans into later-era infamy, including the claim that the non-enlightened members became the biggest party animals on the 1997 Lollapalooza tour – the same year Korn, Snoop Dogg and the Prodigy were on the bill. It’s very much the band telling their own story, though: aside from producer Brian Eno and superfan Chris Martin, the talking heads are almost entirely people who are, or have been, in James.

That makes it an intensely inside look, more focused on the group’s internal push-and-pull than on the wider era or even the songs. The picture that emerges is a mix of “hippies and hardnuts, dreamers and pragmatists” who, as one member puts it, “share an ethos” even when they’re not alike.

James: Getting Away With It is in UK cinemas on 17 August for one night only.