Some of the biggest bands in music followed in their footsteps. Their bombastic live shows are revered by followers all over the world. Celebrity fans have sported their t-shirts in Hollywood films.

Yet for all the fame Los Angeles ska-punk band Fishbone has garnered over its 31-year career, the fortune has never followed, and the band has been on life support more times than its original members can count. Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone, a riveting documentary by San Francisco filmmaker Chris Metzler, charts the thrills and spills of a band that has had more than its fair share of both. The film screens Friday night at 142 Throckmorton Theatre as part of the Mill Valley Film Festival, and the band will perform live afterwards down the street at The Woods Music Hall.

Founding member and bassist Norwood Fisher said the film has had a profoundly positive impact on the band in its current state, but that it was still difficult to watch Fishbone's drama – breakups, departures, financial struggles and even kidnapping charges here in Marin County - play out on the big screen.

"We can all sit around and watch home movies and laugh at them," Fisher said. "But when your home movie is on steroids on the big screen, it's hard for me to open up my medicine cabinet, so to speak, and stand there butt naked."

Metzler and co-director Lev Anderson rounded up a who's who of famous musicians to appear in the film and put the band's inimitable sound and influence in perspective.

"They had a chemistry that was just magic," said Flea, bassist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, which emerged from the same LA scene and with a similar sound to that of Fishbone.

"It was punk ska with these black guys with Mohawks," said No Doubt singer Gwen Stefani, who said her band drew heavily from Fishbone's style and sound. "It just didn't fit into anything."

"They're one of the best live bands I've ever seen in my life," said fellow No Doubt member Tony Kanal said. "We aspired to even try to be close to that."

"They should have been the band that went way beyond any of us that were influenced by them," said Les Claypool of Primus.

"I don't know how many bands started because of them," said record producer David Kahne, who produced Fishbone's self-titled debut EP and actually designed its famous fish skeleton logo on an early Apple Macintosh.

The film's parade of praise buoys the band's turbulent arc. And although Fishbone's roots are firmly planted in Los Angeles, that arc reached a debilitating crossroads here in Marin County in 1993.

With Fishbone on the verge of breakout success and about to head out on that year's Lollapalooza tour, guitarist Kendall Jones had reconnected with his estranged father after the death of his mother and a break-up with his girlfriend. That connection sent him on a religious path that his friends and family saw as a cult. Sensing he was having a complete nervous breakdown, Fisher, Jones' brothers and several others drove to Novato to perform an intervention on Jones that was unsuccessful and that ultimately led then-Marin County District Attorney Jerry Herman to charge the group with kidnapping.

"I did not know that it was possible to twist an adult intervention into a kidnapping," Fisher said in the film.

They were acquitted of all charges, but the band was left in tatters. Keyboardist and songwriter Chris Dowd left soon after Jones, and the band's relationship with its label Sony Records disintegrated. Fisher's brother, drummer Philip "Fish" Fisher, left in 1998, and the band struggled to regain its early momentum. Norwood Fisher and frontman Angelo Moore remained the driving forces behind the band with a steady stream of new members.

In the film, Moore perfectly summed up the band's predicament: "When you've been doing this for a couple of decades and you're living the lifestyle of the famous but not rich and you see everyone else that you started out with doing their music and they've become millionaires behind it and we're still in the same spot," he said.

Fisher said Metzler ultimately captured the spirit of the band and not just its struggles and squabbles.

"My entire life has been more up than down," Fisher said. "Some of the low points were really low, and there were some amazing highs for long stretches, even if there was darkness bubbling up under those highs."

The film is narrated by Laurence Fishburne, who met the band in the early 1980s when he was a bouncer at a club they played at in Hollywood. Metzler knew of the connection and had tried unsuccessfully to reach him, and then Fisher and Moore bumped into Fishburne at the airport in New Orleans after the Voodoo Experience music festival a year ago.

Those Hollywood connections were deep, with Fishbone counting John Cusack and Tim Robbins, who appears in Everyday Sunshine, among its loyal fans. Cusack wore a Fishbone t-shirt in the famous boom-box scene in Say Anything in 1989, and pulled a black Fishbone t-shirt out of his suitcase 21 years later in the film Hot-Tub Time Machine. In the 1988 film Bull Durham, Robbins' character Nuke Laloosh wore a Fishbone t-shirt while giving his first interview after being called up to the big leagues.

"They really pulled people really out of the woodwork for this film," Fisher said. "I started reconnecting with all manner of people from my past from this movie."

For Fisher, seeing the documentary has re-energized the band to write and record more music and maintain its explosive live shows.

"It has actually brought another level of excitement within the band," Fisher said of the film. "It is absolutely something that is bigger than all of us in the band. No matter what happens, there is something that is there for posterity that people can go back and rediscover the band forever."

Everyday Sunshine screens at 142 Throckmorton Theatre at 7 p.m. Friday, and Fishbone performs at 9:30 at The Woods Music Hall.