It’s still a bit strange to feel nostalgic about record stores. Once the dominant mating ground of the endangered mallrat and a fixture of any city’s stab at cool, the businesses have lost their cultural resonance and, even more tragically, are starting to disappear entirely. Colin Hanks’ new documentary about Tower Records comes with a mixture of nostalgia and melancholy.

It’s such an amusing and exciting story for most of its running time that you can’t help but feel nauseous even before the axe starts to drop. Of course, there’s a chance that’s only a factor for folks who grew up in the record store era. Kids may well be confused by all the tears.

Though the film is essentially a slow-motion horror story about the death of the physical music industry, first time director Hanks wisely keeps the movie small and personal. It’s centered around Russ Solomon, the founder and owner of Tower Records, whose rise to power was a mix of right time/right place luck and personal flavor. Solomon opened his first record store in San Francisco in the late 1960s, which was the absolute perfect time and spot to found a business on being the biggest record shop in town. It took off, and he soon expanded to Los Angeles, where his store became a fixture of the entire music industry.

Throughout it all, Solomon ran the business alongside staff members who originally started as clerks. Even though Tower quickly grew into a massive brand, Solomon did everything he could to keep it driven by the delightful weirdoes who were his base customers and employees, and it obviously paid off big time.

Despite some creeping shots through an abandoned store to set the mood, Hanks wisely doesn’t impose himself too much as a filmmaker into ‘All Things Must Pass’. Between Solomon and his gang of oddball geniuses, the director clearly realized he already had a movie and didn’t need to stretch the project at all. Things quickly move from hilarity to inspirational tales as a lark trip to Japan just as that country was becoming obsessed with American culture turned into Tower Records’ biggest international success. (It remains the one country in the world where Tower Records continues to exist.) Tales of partying and accidentally stumbling onto genius business ideas inspire smiles and wonderment from the interview subjects and viewers. There are frequently even touching tales about how Solomon deliberately picked staff members who were passionate and needed the work/opportunity over successful suits trained to find more obvious profits.

Of course, that causal and somewhat renegade approach to the business only worked wonders in an era where the record industry seemed to make more money every year with the constant influx of new artists and new, more expensive music formats. Sadly, Solomon and company were unprepared for how to downgrade or shift their business practices when CD burners, MP3s and file-sharing services came along. Things plummeted quickly, and suddenly the same crop of faces who discussed the Tower Records’ business model from the late ’60s through the mid ’90s with uncontained glee grow sour and even tragic.

It’s a sad and shockingly sudden fall for an iconic industry and a franchise that brought a personal touch to mass commerce. Hanks obviously gets the emotional heft of the film from this section, and it’s a doozy, yet he never exploits his subjects or pushes for emotional crescendos. It’s all built right into the facts and the folks he found tell it perfectly. This was a clever way to explore the demise of the record industry without falling back onto billionaire’s whining. Tower Records was a business conceived and created by fans that succeeded out of the love they brought. Bad business decisions and hubris may have played a role in the swiftness of Tower Records’ collapse, but you still can’t help but feel horrible for the circumstances out of their control that guaranteed failure.

The movie of course has some rambling distractions. Bringing in people like Bruce Springsteen, Dave Grohl and confirmed Tower superfan Elton John (who could actually get the L.A. store to open early for him since he was such a consistent customer) might add star power and interest to the doc, but they sometimes overwhelm the movie. Likewise, as with any 90-minute doc on a big story, there are some areas that could use more focus (like the ill-advised bank loans and failed international expansions) and others that could have been far shorter. (Not everyone needed to cry on camera, nor did Solomon need to take a victory lap through a Japan location.)

Still, for a first documentary, Hanks picked a strong subject, found all the right players, and told his story well. It’s a fascinating, fun and culturally relevant piece of work, which isn’t bad for a documentary about a record store. Too bad it’s impossible for Hanks or anyone else to deliver a happy ending.