Reluctant Rocker: Chrissie Hynde's Pretenders Documentary Premieres in Toronto

Chrissie Hynde has never been comfortable being the subject. The Pretenders frontwoman dislikes cameras, avoids nostalgia and has little patience for self-mythologizing — qualities that made her, by any measure, an unlikely candidate for a documentary about her own band.

Yet "Pretenders," the first authorized film on the group, has now premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it is being offered for sale. It arrives as a pointed contrast to the polished, heavily sanctioned music biographies that dominate the format, carrying instead the blunt sensibility of its subject.

Getting Hynde to agree took years of persuasion by filmmaker Joss Crowley, and the consent came with conditions. She sat for a single on-camera interview and pushed for few talking heads, her own included. She has said she will not watch the finished film.

Speaking alongside Crowley after the premiere, Hynde, 75, appeared faintly puzzled at having been drawn once more into discussing herself. She noted that her home carries no gold records on the walls, and that she finds looking back dispiriting rather than gratifying.

Her reasoning for cooperating was pragmatic: if the band's story was going to be told, she preferred to have a hand in the telling. She also made clear what she did not want — no gushing, no framing of the film as a "women in rock" narrative, and no dissection of the music itself.

Crowley said he aimed to let the songs breathe rather than break them down, treating the music as the film's most valuable element. Hynde's refusal of sentiment and cliche, he added, pushed him toward an anti-gushing portrait, distinct from the many documentaries that take the opposite approach.

Hynde traced her outlook to growing up in the 1960s, a period she considers the best era for music, and to a view of rock as inherently anti-establishment. That spirit, she suggested, has faded: selling out is no longer a meaningful idea, and the rebellious posturing she sees now rings hollow to someone who has met real outlaws.

She remains skeptical of the rituals that have grown around the music. She has little interest in stadium heritage acts, and she rejects the notion of rock royalty outright — a concept, she observed, that sits oddly with someone who lives in England, where the actual royalty was never much admired.

For Hynde, the point is simpler than the mythology suggests: it is three chords, a personality and an expression. Fun, yes — but not something to take too seriously.