Recently, Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder have found themselves in a career renaissance. Reeves has made a remarkable comeback as the dog-loving action-hero John Wick, while Ryder won audiences over as the grief-stricken mother, Joyce Byers, in Netflix’s 80s nostalgia-fest Stranger Things.

The tortuous road to addiction and back again – or maybe not – makes for a faintly tedious experience in Beautiful Boy, notwithstanding the committed performances of an A-list cast.

Egbert Nathaniel Dawkins III – Aloe Blacc – is one shrewd dude. He's extremely adept at reaching out beyond the confines of his natural beat of funk and soul, whether that's credible (covering The Velvet Underground's “Femme Fatale”) on his breakthrough 2010 Good Thingsalbum or commercial (co-writing and singing the late Swedish EDM gigastar Aviicii's “Wake Me Up” can't have done his bank balance any harm, what with going to number one in 22 countries). And of course nobody ever went bankrupt releasing a Christmas album... 

The master of the Southern California police procedural is back.

“This, quite possibly, could be a really good night,” declared David Crosby. He’s a couple of songs into this show, one of only two UK dates on the tour promoting his current album Sky Trails. Looking trim, beaming and in impeccable voice, the 77-year-old known as Croz fulfils his prophecy – and then some.

Shoegaze was only a moment really, a scene that flared briefly as the Eighties drew to a close. The music press – the “inkies” - used the term to describe bands, usually flop-fringed with lazy posture, whose heads would hang as they played gigs, ostensibly because they were looking at effects pedals and wotnot, but really because they and their music were shy. Following the example of My Bloody Valentine, they’d found a way to hide their pop songs amid distortion, deep down in it.

The heartland of America burns a special candle for two genres in particular: country music and heavy metal. What’s curious, then, is that there’s not been more cross-breeding between the styles. On a cartoon level, this can be attributed to one being God’s music and the other, Satan’s, but you’d have thought that would only encourage determined, disenfranchised teenagers in Lexington, Kentucky, or wherever.

Brett Goodroad (b. 1979) is an artist and painter based in San Francisco. Born and raised in rural Montana, in 2012 he received the Tournesol Award, overseen by Sausalito’s Headland Center for the Arts. The Award recognises one Bay Area painter each year and financially assisted Goodroad and gave him studio space, allowing him to develop his distinctive, figurative, abstract style.

In 1976, when his first solo album Slippin’ Away was released, Chris Hillman could look back on being a founder member of The Byrds and The Flying Burrito Brothers, two of America’s most important bands. He had also played alongside former members of Buffalo Springfield in Manassas and The Souther-Hillman-Furay Band.

The Monterey Pop Festival in California in mid-June 1967 was a key event in the history of festival culture. There had been music festivals before in the US – Newport Folk springs to mind – but Monterey marked the point where the whimsical trend for “renaissance fairs” combined with the rising first blaze of rock music, born of psychedelia, all marinated thoroughly in LSD-flavoured happenings and love-ins. And, of course, it was filmed by DA Pennebaker, making it a visual blueprint, ripe for imitation, influencing countless generations into the idea of festivals as miniature countercultural utopias.

The film, only 79 minutes long, remains fantastic. This writer was blown away by it in his teens and 20s but, decades later, it’s lost none of its potency, perhaps even gained some as its defiantly non-cynical attitude seems so refreshing in these meta times. The first thing that strikes is how fantastically everyone is dressed, how sharp, how individual, making me want to weep at the rise of sportswear which has destroyed sartorial suss the planet round. But mainly, despite a bit of crowd action, it doesn't have Woodstock's propensity for tangential asides. It’s a lean musical entity.

And what music! Grace Slick out-singing all the men in Jefferson Airplane; Simon & Garfunkel silhouetted beautifully against a red backdrop; Janis Joplin channelling Etta James to invent Robert Plant and every heavy metal vocalist of the Seventies and Eighties; Otis Redding backed by Booker T & the MGs, just so tight, so sexy, the ultimate soul man; The Who going bonkers (“This is where it all ends!”); Hendrix setting his guitar and his career alight; and finally Ravi Shankar in a long, wonderful, frenetic back’n’forth with his tabla-player Alla Rakha, just mesmerising.

However, what most will be buying this three-disc set for is the extras. As well as a 16-bit 4K digital restoration of the original film, there are the complete filmed sets of Hendrix and Redding, and two hours of performance footage that wasn’t used in the film, running the gamut from the sharply choreographed, suited pop of The Association to falsetto oddball Tiny Tim, to The Byrds, frostily falling out with David Crosby onstage, their music suffering as a consequence.

There are also various interviews, old and new (Pennebaker, impresario Lou Adler, the Mamas and the Papas’ John Phillips, Sixties PR legend Derek Taylor, David Crosby, Mama Cass), as well as audio commentaries (Pennebaker, Adler, writers Charles Shaar Murray and Peter Guralnick), photos and Richard Leacock’s subversive short film about the police, Chiefs, which was the support feature when Monterey Pop was originally released to cinema. There’s also a booklet of essays featuring Barney Hoskyns, Michael Chaiken and others.

Much of this material has been available in the States since 2004, but this set really is the complete deal, a plethora of treats for fans of the original film and, for anyone else, an untainted window into Californian music culture, just as the Summer of Love was starting to bubble. It’s one of the all-time great music films, simple as that.

• Read more film reviews on theartsdesk

Overleaf: watch Ravi Shanker and table-player Alla Rakha play an astounding, nigh-on-20 minute version of "Dhun" at the Monterey Pop Festival