‘The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers: Our Brother, Hillel’

By Anna Menta

I’m a sucker for rock music documentaries, even ones that are being disavowed by the band they are about. So, sue me, but I really enjoyed the new Netflix doc with the unwieldy title, The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers: Our Brother, Hillel. (That title is likely thanks to the RHCP’s statement on Instagram, writing that they participated in the film thinking it was a Hillel Slovak documentary, which is now “advertised as a Red Hot Chili Peppers documentary, which it is not.”) Still, for  fans who didn’t hop on board until the ’90s, this doc is a good primer on the band’s origins and their original guitarist, Hillel Slovak, who died of a drug overdose in 1988.

Photo: Courtesy of Netflix © 2026