Hype! is a remarkable achievement, given that it was shot without Hollywood or MTV money (with most of the budget going into sound recording), and given that director Pray and producer Steve Helvey didn't show up with their cameras until 1992, after the scene had already exploded nationwide. By the time Pray and Helvey arrived, virtually every media outlet in America (and many from abroad) had sent some clueless reporter to Seattle to get the dirt on grunge, and the locals were understandably suspicious.

Pray managed to win their trust in several ways. As a director of videos for Seattle's Young Fresh Fellows, he already had some local credibility. Second, he solicited interviews only from the musicians and hometown scenesters; there is no omniscient voiceover in the movie and no interviews with outside observers. Third, he gave the music his fullest respect, shooting performances by even obscure bands in small clubs with a full three-camera set-up and state-of-the-art sound recording. ("Recorded in SwellSound," the end credits boast.) As a result, the performance sequences in Hype! have a rare, visceral, you-are-there sense of immediacy and spontaneity that will have viewers stage-diving and crowd-surfing in the multiplex.

The Washingtonians responded to Pray's overtures with astonishing generosity. Fans lent the filmmakers rare video footage of 1980s club performances by obscure bands crucial in the Seattle scene's development (such as Fastbacks, U-Men, and Green River, the band who mutated into Mudhoney and Pearl Jam). There's also a glimpse of what may be the grunge holy grail: Nirvana's first live performance of "Smells like Teen Spirit" in early 1991, which listeners even then could tell was the beginning of an avalanche.

The interview subjects also respond with surprising candor and eloquence. They create a picture of a community that reveled in its geographical and musical isolation, a scene based on misfits coming together to bask in mutual self-loathing. ("We're nerds, goddammit!" crows Van Conner of Screaming Trees.) The fans guarded their favorite bands like secrets. "You weren't supposed to be proud of having a hit record," says Bruce Pavitt, co-founder of Sub Pop Records.

Sub Pop, of course, got the Seattle hype ball rolling. Modeling their local label after Detroit's Motown, Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman sold not just individual records or bands but the whole town. Bands would be recorded by the same producer, their records designed by the same art director, and all would be marketed with the same geek-chic cachet. T-shirts bore the label's name and the word "Loser" years before Beck turned it into an alienated-youth anthem. Scouts from the major labels came in, snapped up the likes of Soundgarden, Nirvana, and Pearl Jam -- and suddenly this remote outpost found itself the focus of international scrutiny.

Seizing upon grunge's most marketable aspects (flannel, punk attitude, caffeine), the mass media cheapened and diluted the scene to a point of ridiculousness, as Pray shows in a witty montage of found clips (from a Jeopardy! question about Pearl Jam to MCI's "phone dude" ad with Larry "Bud" Melman). "It's essentially all been one big prank," says Sub Pop's Megan Jasper, who tried to regain control of the situation by feeding a glossary of fake grunge slang to the credulous New York Times. When a depressed Kurt Cobain killed himself in 1994, his death seemed an apt metaphor for the Seattle scene's inevitable implosion.

The success of Nirvana and Pearl Jam made Seattle an aberration only in degree, not in kind. In a sense, Hype! is just as much about Athens, Georgia, in 1983, or Boston in 1993, or Orange County, California, in 1994, or wherever the pop vultures converge in their blind, lumbering search for the Next Big Thing. As the final title card of Hype! ominously warns, "YOUR TOWN IS NEXT."