One thing Gen-X kids used to do — other people, too, of course, but I’m talking about something specific — was hang around with friends and listen to records. You might have been skipping school, you might have been smoking weed, but it could just as well have been a Sunday afternoon with a two-liter bottle of soda. Maybe someone had a guitar or a drum kit you could mess around with, and maybe after a while you even started a band, but the main thing was being together, pooling your collective teenage energies against the forces of boredom and responsibility.

Eventually, most of us negotiated a truce or surrendered outright. Not the Beastie Boys. And while there is admiration and affection on the faces of the middle-aged fans flocking to the Kings Theater in Brooklyn in “Beastie Boys Story,” there’s some envy-tinged nostalgia, too. As Adam Horovitz and Michael Diamond, the surviving members of the trio, explain from the theater’s stage — in a live appearance directed and filmed by their pal Spike Jonze — they turned goofing around with friends and musical equipment into a career and a way of life.