A music documentary built entirely around one song sounds like a precious affair, but it can be a tantalizing one if the song is right. The one-song doc has now emerged as a genre, and in a small way it’s an exciting one. I dug “The Greatest Night in Pop” (2024), about the creation of “We Are the World” (though that was obviously an anomaly of a song), and also “Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song” (2021), which explored how a tune that wasn’t even all that wonderful in the original recorded version could evolve, over time, into a transcendent global hymn.

The latest one-song music doc, Rick Korn’s “ Harry Chapin — Cat’s in the Cradle: The Song That Changed Our Lives,” feels like it was influenced by the Cohen film. It, too, captures a song that became a hymn, one that grew

See Full Page