The Best Summer Pulls Back the Curtain on Iconic Summersault Tour
Still from The Best Summer. Photo courtesy of the Calgary International Film Festival.
Have you ever wanted to relive your “best summer ever?” Maybe this is a summer you spent with your friends during a formative time, in your teens or early twenties, that you can only remember in memory fragments, but it brings you warm feelings every time you flashback to that time. What if I were to tell you there was a box of video tapes that you forgot you recorded from that same summer and you actually can relive it?
This is what happened to director Tamra Davis, when she had to evacuate from her home during the 2025 Palisades Fires, and stumbled on this box of video tapes she personally recorded over a one month period during the 1995 Summersault tour in Australia, headlined by the Beastie Boys, Sonic Youth, Foo Fighters, Beck, Pavement, Rancid, Bikini Kill and The Amps.
Tamra Davis’ connection to this tour is that she had recently married Mike D of the Beastie Boys and was following the tour through him as well as her friends from the music scene Sonic Youth (Davis directed Sonic Youth’s videos for “100%” and “Bull in the Heather”) and Kathleen Hanna (Hanna was featured in the “Bull in the Heather” video). So while on the surface, this is a gathering of some of the biggest names in alternative music of the 1990s, for Tamra Davis, it was just an opportunity to hang out with her new husband (after being away from him for months due to recently wrapping production on the film Billy Madison, Adam Sandler’s first starring vehicle which would later become one of the all-time great comedies) and friends for a summer.
This is the touch that sets The Best Summer apart. Tamra Davis did not set out to make a documentary when she was filming this tour; she simply had a Sony camcorder and was filming her family and friends in fun moments, because that’s just what you did in the ‘90s! So what you see on screen during The Best Summer are unguarded, fun moments of friends hanging out backstage, or being stoked as they watch each other play sets on tour.
The masterstroke of The Best Summer is how it genuinely feels like a lost movie from 1996. All of the footage is grainy, VHS-quality; when you see performances from Beastie Boys and Sonic Youth in the film it’s in charmingly-cruddy camcorder sound quality. There is zero modern gloss, it feels like a tape you stumbled on in a flea market that just happens to feature some of the biggest and most influential names in alternative music of the ’90s. There is also zero modern context, the film is simply a document of this one Australian summer in 1995, where it creates an act of immersion. The greatest example of this is when Kathleen Hanna (who is billed as “starring Kathleen Hanna” in the credits, due to her wonderfully commanding presence throughout the entire film) bumps into Adam Horovitz (Ad-Rock) of the Beastie Boys.
Throughout the film, Hanna is unflappable talking to artists backstage, but in the presence of Ad-Rock, she gets nervous and shy, as she clearly has a crush on him. Kathleen Hanna would later write in her memoir Rebel Girl that she met Ad-Rock for the very first time on this Summersault tour, so that you get to witness the actual romantic comedy “meet-cute” moment between Adam Horovitz and Kathleen Hanna, who would later get together and get married in 2006, is such a gift! It’s a gift for not just fans of Hanna and Horovitz, who get to witness the literal moments of them sheepishly interacting with each other, but for Hanna and Horovitz themselves. Just think of when you fell in love with someone, someone who would later become your long-term partner, and that decades later, you got to actually see the footage of you two falling in love? This is why when Davis screened the film for Horovitz for the first time, his first words were “it felt like you reached into my brain and pulled out that memory. How did you know that memory existed in my head?”
The Best Summer was a fully self-funded and self-produced passion project for Tamra Davis. She never had any studio notes to answer for, the only people she screened the movie for were the artists featured on the tour, as that’s who the movie was about: her family and music friends. It’s why the film is so intimate; even though the Beastie Boys are multi-platinum superstars at this point, you see them with their guard down, chilling on a boat blasting The Fugees’ recently released “Fu-Gee-La” between shows.
The Best Summer is a time capsule as a film. You see Beck, one year before his Grammy-winning sensation Odelay changes his life. You see Dave Grohl, just barely a year after Kurt Cobain’s passing, trying to forge his own lane with Foo Fighters, speaking in sensitive heart-to-heart moments about trying to find his voice with Kathleen Hanna backstage. You have Pavement and Rancid, at the absolute peak of their powers, having fun and mingling with the other bands. It’s also a snapshot of seeing Beastie Boys and Sonic Youth performing bands, two bands who you will never see perform live again.
It’s no surprise that the main theme of The Best Summer is one of friendship, given her 2002 film Crossroads (starring Britney Spears) is one of the very best films about female friendship ever made, but there is such warmth and beauty on screen. It inspires you to go create something with your own friends, as while we can never return to the blissful no-phones period present in the ’90s (where every single artist on the Summersault tour is reading a book!), that level of DIY creativity is eternal. Whether you are a fan of any of the above Summersault headliners or just want to spend 80 minutes with musicians having fun on a summer tour, The Best Summer is an essential film that reminds you of the possibilities and power of documentary filmmaking. I know for myself, after I finished watching it, I reflected back on my own “best summers ever” and reminisced about those times when we all had no cares in the world, which is a nice state of mind to be in.