Director Florian Habicht talks about his new film that revisits the '90s with British band Pulp.

Pulp was a British band that reached the peak of its musical power in the mid-1990s. They stormed the shores of the United States on a wave of so-called Britpop music popularity, alongside bands like Oasis, The Verve (whose "Bittersweet Symphony," just yesterday, burst out of my editor's online radio station on her computer), Blur, Lush, Curve, Ride, Suede and Supergrass.

Yeah, they liked the one-word names back then, but then some bands bucked that trend, like Primal Scream, St. Etienne, Ned's Atomic Bustin, and Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine. (The Weekly's resident music writer, Adam Joseph, just tweeted a related nugget from Rolling Stone about the reforming of the Britop shoegazer band Ride.)

It was like another wave of the British Invasion, but less dominating, more insular, a polite rejection of the dark and dirty American grunge of Nirvana, Alice in Chains and Soundgarden. It was very British. Pulp sure were. They were also class-conscious in a way that few American pop acts have been. Their album masterpiece at the time was titled Different Class; one of its big singles a working-class anthem called "Common People."

The band's lead singer, Jarvis Cocker, was a playfully preening glam star who stood up for the freaks and geeks who got their asses kicked by the populars and bullies. "We won't use guns, we won't bombs, we'll use the one thing we've got more of and that's our minds" he rallied his family of young outcasts.

A documentary is coming to Osio Cinemas for one night only (7:30pm tonight, Wednesday) about the band. It's called Pulp: A Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets.

The premise is that the band never had a formal farewell concert when they dissolved back in 2001, and so they reunite for a big blow-out in their hometown of Sheffield to do it right. Eccentric German-born, New Zealand-raised director Florian Habicht is a fan of the band. And he puts other fans on camera for the big show.

"I was quite pleasantly surprised that there were young people as well as older," he says. "I've been to a few concerts of bands from the '90s. The Human League in Sheffield was all older people. I was the youngest."

He is 39 years old. Pulp, more than a decade after calling it quits, is still cultivating young fans in their teens and 20s.

The premise seems to set up the film as a British counterpart to the 2011 documentary Shut Up and Play the Hits, the farewell New York concert of LCD Soundsystem. And Pulp is one of the mid-'90s Britpop bands that Simon Pegg crammed into his music-heavy movie The World's End. But Habicht turns the camera on the entire town of Sheffield from whence the band came, in a sort-of anthropological examination of the people and the place that made the band.

The film crew goes to the meat market where the future superstar singer Jarvis Cocker (who's actually quite normal and even frumpy now) used to work as a lad. The camera also settles on cityscapes of Sheffield. It goes into a nursing home where the residents are corralled into singing the ironic aging anthem (yes, an anthem for growing old) "Help the Aged." A teen girl dance team does a sassy choreography to Pulp's music. There are strains of nostalgia that float in and out of the film. The music survives the band.

"I think they don't bullshit," Habicht says. "There's a real honesty in their songs. That's why they stand the test of time. They are who they are."

He is traveling with the film and talking about it—it played in Kosovo recently. He doesn't agree that the band was part of the Britpop movement. I respectfully disagree. So do listeners of the BBC Radio 6 Music, who this year, in celebration of the 20th anniversary of Britpop, voted Pulp's "Common People" the scene's top anthem.

The film shifts among shots of interviews with band members, on-the-street interviews with Sheffield residents and fans, and concert footage. It covers a lot of ground, but at the expense of depth. You'll learn more about a band from a VH-1 Behind the Music episode. But it gives equitable time to so many different people and places that it feels like an ariel photo that occasionally dive-bombs in for polite interviews. There were a couple of segments, though, that might have livened things up.

"We interviewed a Sheffield porn star, Bambi Black, who said some beautiful things about love," Habicht says of the collaborative creation of the film. "I was surprised that didn't end up in the film. We had sexual dance to 'Live Bed Show' that didn't end up in the film. I like to think we got all the interesting things in the film."

Pulp's songs were always strong on narrative stories. So it's not surprising that the film sometimes feels like a backdrop for the rousing musical numbers played at the massive concert or underneath the film's atmospheric sound design. One revelation comes from keyboardist Candida, who divulges that she had near crippling arthritis during the heyday of the band, which she had mostly kept to herself. It's intimate, but it's not necessarily mindblowing. She's bemused when she tells the story, and so are we. But bemused doesn't quite capture the electricity of the band at its peak.

"We'll be on stage and thinking this is the center of the universe here," lead singer Cocker tells the camera. "But there are people doing all sorts of things. Some people will watching the telly, some people will be scoring drugs, some people will be giving birth. There are all these parallel things going on."

And that's one of the impressive things about Pulp. They were wise. As if they had time-traveled from the future and brought back hindsight into their songs about the big bang explosion of youth, when possibility is still expanding; the difference between dreams and reality; the relative nature of our moving lives; the singular horniness of virgins. Wise words sung brashly. Like the looking back of "Disco 2000":

I said let's all meet up in the year 2000.

Won't it be strange when we're all fully grown.

Be there at 2 o'clock by the fountain down the road.

I never knew that you'd get married.

I would be living down here on my own on that damp and lonely

Thursday years ago.

"The nice thing about what music and filmmaking does is it brings people together," Habicht says. "People who might not normally get together. I did an interview with journalist in Montreal. A Pulp fan. We realized toward the end of interview that we were sitting next to each other at a Pulp show at Radio City Music Hall in New York. And we were talking to each other then. Music. It's a magical thing."

Pulp: Life, Death and Supermarkets plays 7:45pm at Osio Cinemas Nov. 19, Wednesday.