You could get lost in the details, as the director did. Iwai lacks the judgment of Hughes; Lily Chou-Chou runs 146 minutes. There's no reason for a movie about pop music to be as long as a boxed set. Lily zealots discuss every part of her life and are fixated on "the ether," the karmic amniotic fluid in which she dwells. That's because most of them desperately require some beauty in their lives; the Internet postings about Lily are rooted in her fans' neediness.
It's only Lily who gives them sanctuary, and they wax rhapsodic about the healing capacity of her music, a meld of pop and the cooled-out meditations of Debussy and Satie.
The original music was composed by Takeshi Kobayashi, who has worked with Iwai before. (The Western correlative to her sound would probably be something like the heroic pop congregation My Bloody Valentine, which has taken on the stature of myth; the group has completed only one album in the last decade, but its fans buzz full time about the band's future.)
Obviously the picture isn't all about Lily Chou-Chou but about the kids and the way music envelops them. Iwai seems to share the compulsion of Lily's fans, elaborating on minutiae about Lily that he provides in a gesture or two -- like the performers Lily is modeled after.
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