Crowe also helmed 1989’s “Say Anything …,” which includes one of the finest contemporary musical moments in film: When Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack) holds up a boombox playing Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” outside Diane Court’s (Ione Skye) bedroom window.

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Enter Dave Grohl, Lynryd Skynyrd, The Eagles • One of the most highly anticipated films to open at Sundance this year is the directorial debut of former Nirvana drummer and current Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl. His “Sound City” documentary chronicles the rise and fall of the famed Los Angeles music studio where classic albums such as Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours” and Nirvana’s seminal “Nevermind” were recorded. The movie also serves as a philosophical treatise hailing the indie spirit of people making music together in a live setting, rather than in front of a computer.

The new documentary “is the most important thing I’ve ever done,” Grohl said in a phone interview. “All along, our goal was Sundance, from Day 1. It seemed like the perfect place to be.”

Along with the film’s premiere on Jan. 18, the Park City Live venue will host a sold-out performance of Dave Grohl’s Sound City Players. This first incarnation will feature musicians featured in the documentary, including Stevie Nicks, John Fogerty, Rick Springfield, Alain Johannes, Chris Goss and Corey Taylor, as well as Rick Nielsen of Cheap Trick, Lee Ving of Fear and Brad Wilk of Rage Against The Machine.

Also taking the stage will be a cast of Grohl’s current and former bandmates including Taylor Hawkins, Nate Mendel, Chris Shiflett, Krist Novoselic and Pat Smear. Smear, Novoselic and Grohl are the surviving members of Nirvana, and their reunion, alone, would make for a historic evening.

Another music-related film at this year’s festival is “Muscle Shoals,” a documentary from another first-time director, Greg “Freddy” Camalier, which explores the history of the small Alabama town and the area’s outsize impact on modern music. The film includes interviews from Bono, Mick Jagger, Gregg Allman, Aretha Franklin and Alicia Keys, focusing on the studios where songs such as “Brown Sugar,” “When a Man Loves a Woman” and “I’ll Take You There” were recorded. The locale and house band were also immortalized by a lyric in Lynyrd Skynyrd’s classic song “Sweet Home Alabama.”

“They don’t call it a universal language for nothing,” said Camalier, explaining the reason to make a film with music as its thematic thread.

Then there’s “History of The Eagles Part 1,” a music documentary with an impressive filmmaking pedigree. Directed by Alison Ellwood, the biopic is produced by Alex Gibney, who directed “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” nominated in 2005 for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and “Taxi to the Dark Side,” which won the documentary-feature Oscar in 2007. His other films include “Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer” and “Casino Jack and the United States of Money.” This year’s festival also will screen Gibney’s “We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks,” another buzzed-about documentary.

The Eagles documentary has a resonance because the band’s music served as a soundtrack to the 1970s and beyond, Ellwood said. “When people listen to Eagles songs, people didn’t just listen to The Eagles, they did things to The Eagles,” she said. “People have memories of iconic musical things in their lives.”

For example, she remembered the first time she ever ate sushi. She was sitting in a sushi bar, listening to “Hotel California” playing on the radio while chefs were tapping their wooden mallets to Don Henley’s drumming.

Music and film are inextricably linked, Gibney said. “You want to feel music, not talk about it,” he said. “That’s what cinema does at its best.”