I’m not going to try and justify or apologize for the fact that I recently viewed the new Genesis documentary/concert film, When In Rome. I did it, and I am not sorry. (Nor am I sorry for riding my bike to the nearest Wal-Mart, which is in the suburbs, to purchase the DVD because Wal-Mart is the only U.S. retailer selling the DVD, and I kind of wanted to be able to say that I rode my bike to a Wal-Mart in the suburbs to buy the new Genesis DVD.)

I have a Masters of Fine Arts degree.

Whether you’re a fan of Genesis and/or Phil Collins or not, I think this short film is a nice little portrait of what happens when a handful of wildly successful musicians in their mid-fifties decide to undertake that dubious endeavor that is the reunion tour, and the developments, both positive and otherwise, that result from a fifteen-year hiatus and subsequent reconvening in lavish rehearsal halls tucked away in Lausanne and Helsinki with seven months to rehearse and a quadrillion-dollar production budget.

Through it all, the person who acquits himself surprisingly admirably is actually Phil Collins. There’s none of the supposed egotism or overweening ambition that has led to various PR issues over the span of his thirty years as a solo artist (and I stress the word “artist”); no mention of Tarzan, or any of the other occasionally middling pap he’s churned out during his solo career, or his insistence on collaborating with Eric Clapton, or Tarzan, or his three divorces, or Tarzan. Rather, he emerges as a talented but flawed musician in his autumn years—which was never how I’ve perceived him until a very specific moment in the documentary.

It’s a moment that occurs early in the film, a poignant scene in which Collins and his bandmates are listening to highlights from their forty-year(!) career, trying to decide which songs to perform on the tour. They finally settle on one, “Duke’s Travels,” and decide to attempt it. It’s a hard piece, full of syncopated guitar rhythms and off-kilter synth lines and, of course, a wickedly difficult drum part that always enraged me whenever I tried to even approximate it on my drum kit in the basement in eighth grade.

And in this scene, the rest of the band is nailing the song, picking it right back up from whenever it was they might have played it last, which keep in mind was probably about twenty-five years ago. That’s another fascinating and staggeringly impressive aspect of the rehearsal footage: how these guys, especially Tony Banks, the keyboardist, just have four decades and fourteen albums’ worth of parts just stored away in their muscle memory.

Or do they? Because here’s the thing: the part in question, during this scene—Collins can’t play it. He’s having trouble. He’s struggling to keep up and he’s grimacing and shaking his head and stopping and starting, just like I do when I can’t get a part right. He does that thing that any frustrated drummer does when he’s having trouble with a part: he begins to play, both haltingly and hurriedly, and almost seems to know before he even starts playing that he’s not going to nail it, and quits almost immediately. When I saw him do this I simultaneously felt empathy and gratification: I’ve done that so many times. He’s just like me! He puts down his sticks and there’s an awkward pause before he apologizes to his bandmates (”It’s not your problem. It’s my problem”) and suddenly throws his headset to the ground, clearly angry with himself.

I’ve been playing along with the guy for over twenty years now and he’s never been anything less than a superhuman drumming machine, a template of perfection for me to try and emulate, if not quite match, note for note. But here, he’s just a dude who hasn’t been practicing enough. It’s like the first time you realize, as a child, that your parents are less than perfect, fully capable of slamming their fingers in the kitchen drawer or forgetting to take out the trash.

Of course, he does eventually nail it … sort of. The part he ends up playing in concert is recognizably different, modified and presumably easier. But who can pay attention to such trifles in light of a reunion tour which nets the band eleventy trillion dollars, culminating in a free(!!) show in Rome to over 500,000(!!!) people? Ultimately, Phil Collins is actually nothing at all like me, which is what I suspected all along.