‘Tribe Called Quest’ documentary displays the chords and discord

Musical groups come together and they come apart, and even the ones that come apart occasionally get back together for gigs and another fan-tantalizing prospect of a new album.

So it is with A Tribe Called Quest, the subject of debut feature filmmaker Michael Rapaport’s bracing documentary – a reminder, part “Behind the Music” and part something better, that even artists professing love and togetherness have a hard time keeping it going.

Band members have expressed varying degrees of approval and disapproval regarding the film, which contains a fair amount of unvarnished acrimony during the seductive, jazz-inflected hip-hop innovators’ 2008 Rock the Bells reunion tour.

Q-Tip, the chilled-out dandy at the center, has known fellow Quest collaborator Phife Dawg since they were 2, growing up in the same Queens, N.Y., neighborhood as Run-DMC.

Dawg’s later health crises and mounting medical bills prompted the reunion on which Rapaport trains his camera.

In many cases a warts-and-all documentary can lead on-camera subjects to perform their anxieties and conflicts in a way that feels false. Here, there’s surprisingly little of that.

The group formed in 1985 and recorded five albums from 1990 to 1998. By the time of the fifth album, “The Love Movement,” the love was seriously tested, and off-stage footage reveals four men (Q-Tip, Dawg, Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Jarobi White) struggling to relearn their own camaraderie.

Rapaport intersperses interviews with rap and hip-hop players who came later. The best material, however, keeps returning to the unstable power dynamic between Q-Tip and Dawg.

The latter has supported the film from the beginning; Q-Tip, not so much. After being mistakenly cc’d on a harsh email from one of the producers regarding the group’s potential profit participation in the movie, he took to Twitter with a vengeance.

“It was an opportunity to show the craftsmanship,” he tweeted one follower July 1. “But instead reality TV sentiment was the way.”

One week later, he changed his tune for the film’s premieres and tweeted: “NYC/ LA stand up! There is a movie out there that is a slice of hiphop culture called BEATS RHYMES and LIFE! SEE IT!”

Well, we all change our minds. Anyway, he’s right. You should see it.