Original Film Title: The Pain And The Power
Director’s Name: Cai Indermaur
Writer’s Name: Cai Indermaur
Producer: Cai Indermaur
Country of Origin: United States
Country of Filming: United States
Language: English
Runtime: 1 hour 46 minutes 35 seconds
Film Description:
Decades after a sixteen-year addiction to cocaine, alcohol, and crack nearly ended his life, a Queer musician retraces his memory, music, and the wreckage left behind.
Presented by GRAMMY-winning band Portugal. The Man via PortuGAY at KNIK Records, The Pain and The Power is an award-winning, unflinching documentary portrait of artist, activist, and survivor Logan Lynn by filmmaker Cai Indermaur. Tracing a 30-year career forged at the intersection of queerness, faith, addiction, trauma, and self-reinvention, and structured around the songs from Lynn’s latest record of the same name, the film treats music not as background but as a living character.
Beginning in rural Nebraska and Texas inside a fundamentalist Christian world hostile to any type of difference, the film follows Lynn’s early sense of displacement, religious trauma, and abuse, and the ways secrecy and fear shaped both identity and survival. Through intimate interviews with Lynn, and decades of archival footage, music videos, and home movies, the film charts a restless trajectory: early success, underground acclaim, addiction, public collapse, and the slow, deliberate work of rebuilding a life on one’s own terms.
Behind the scenes footage from early music videos, vintage tour clips, and present-day studio conversations collide with moments of humor, tenderness, and brutal honesty, and features stories about Lynn’s history with Elliott Smith, The Dandy Warhols, The Get Up Kids, 80s popstar Tiffany, his embattled relationship with Harvey Weinstein, and more. The result is neither a redemption arc nor a nostalgia piece, but a meditation on what it means to outlive the versions of yourself that no longer serve you. The Pain and The Power asks what remains after belief systems fail, relationships end, and the spotlight moves on; and how art can transform damage into something communal, generous, and alive.
The film was named Best Documentary at the Global Visionaries Film Festival (Singapore), the London Independent Film Awards (UK), and the Elegant International Film Festival (India), Best Documentary Feature Film at the Golden Lion International Film Festival (India), Best Debut Documentary at the Athens International Monthly Art Film Festival (Greece), Best LGBTQ+ Feature at the Milan Indie Film Festival (Italy), Best LGBTQ+ Film at the Global Visionaries Film Festival (Singapore), The Rainbowstone Award (Best LGBTQ+) at ZepFest (USA), Best First-Time Director at the Berlin Indie Film Festival and the Portugal Indie Film Festival, and it won the Silver Award for Feature Documentary at the Paris Film Awards, the Milan Gold Awards, the London Movie Awards, and the Hollywood Gold Awards.
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