The film stars Val Kilmer as singer Jim Morrison, Meg Ryan as Morrison's girlfriend Pamela Courson, Kyle MacLachlan as keyboardist Ray Manzarek, Frank Whaley as lead guitarist Robby Krieger, Kevin Dillon as drummer John Densmore, Billy Idol as Cat, and Kathleen Quinlan as journalist Patricia Kennealy.

In 1949, young Jim Morrison and his family are traveling on a desert highway in New Mexico where they encounter an auto wreck and see an elderly Native American dying by the roadside.

Jim's onstage antics and lewd performance of the group's song "The End" upset the club's owners, and the band is ejected from the venue.

The Doors are soon invited to perform on The Ed Sullivan Show, only to be told by one of the producers that they must change the lyric "girl we couldn't get much higher" in the song "Light My Fire", due to a reference to drugs.

As the Doors' success continues, Jim becomes increasingly infatuated with his own image as "The Lizard King" and develops an addiction to alcohol and drugs.

Jim arrives late and intoxicated to a Miami, Florida concert, becoming increasingly confrontational towards the audience and threatening to expose himself onstage.

Jim visits his bandmates for the final time, attending a birthday party hosted by Ray where he wishes the band luck in their future endeavors and gives each of them a copy of his poetry book An American Prayer.

As Jim plays in the front garden with the children, he sees that one of them is his childhood self and comments, "This is the strangest life I've ever known" (a lyric from the Doors song "Waiting for the Sun"), before passing out.

Film directors Quentin Tarantino,[2] Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese and William Friedkin had all flirted with making a Doors biopic over the years.

Harari contacted Stone again and the director met with the surviving band members, telling them he wanted to keep a particularly wild scene from one of the early drafts.

[citation needed] By 1989, Mario Kassar and Andrew Vajna, who owned Carolco Pictures, had acquired the rights to the project and wanted Stone to direct it.

[10] Before filming started, Stone and his producers had to negotiate with the three surviving band members and their label, Elektra Records, as well as the parents of both Morrison and his girlfriend Pamela Courson.

[3] When Stone began talking about the project in 1988, he had Val Kilmer in mind to play Morrison, after seeing him in the Ron Howard fantasy film Willow.

[17] Krieger acted as a technical advisor on the film, chiefly to show his cinematic alter ego, Frank Whaley, where to put his fingers on the guitar fretboard during the mimed performance sequences.

Abdul recommended Bill and Jacqui Landrum, who watched hours of concert footage before working with Kilmer and got him to do dance exercises to loosen up his upper body and jumping routines to develop his stamina.

[20] During the concert scenes, Kilmer did his own singing, performing over the Doors' master tapes without Morrison's lead vocals, avoiding lip-synching.

[21] Kilmer's endurance was put to the test during the concert sequences, which took several days to film, with Stone stating, "His voice would start to deteriorate after two or three takes.

"[22] One sequence, filmed inside the Whisky a Go Go, proved to be more difficult than others due to all the smoke and sweat, a result of the body heat and intense camera lights.

[22] Controversy arose during filming when a memo linked to Kilmer circulated among cast and crew members, listing rules of how the actor was to be treated for the duration of principal photography.

An upset Stone contacted Kilmer's agent and the actor claimed it was a misunderstanding and that the memo was for his own people and not the film crew.

[27] For example, when Morrison is asked to change the lyric in "Light My Fire" for his appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, he is depicted as blatantly ignoring the request, defiantly shouting "higher!

[35] Kennealy is also portrayed as being the girl Morrison was with in the shower stall backstage before the December 9, 1967 New Haven concert (not 1968 as inscribed in the film), when in fact he was with a local teenage co-ed from Southern Connecticut State University.

[citation needed] John Densmore is portrayed as hating Morrison when the singer's personal and drug problems begin to dominate his behavior.

[43][44] Manzarek described Stone's version as a "grotesque exaggeration", and recalled that Morrison's film was a "much lighter, much friendlier, much funnier kind of thing".

[43] As the credits point out and as Stone emphasizes in his DVD commentary, some characters, names, and incidents in the film are fictitious or amalgamations of real people.

[48] Courson's parents had inherited Morrison's poems when their daughter died, and Stone had to agree to restrictions about his portrayal of her in exchange for the rights to use the poetry.

In Riders on the Storm, Densmore says Courson said she felt terribly guilty because she had obtained drugs that she believed had either caused or contributed to Morrison's death.

[54] In a 2010 piece for Q magazine, Keith Cameron stated that "few people emerged from seeing the film having raised their opinions of that band and especially its singer Jim Morrison."

The problem, as critic Cameron put it, was not so much that "Stone dwelled upon Morrison the inebriate, the philanderer, or the pretentious Lizard King", but rather the "clichéd Hollywood devices for sucking the wonder from the pioneering band: actors with fake hair saying silly things ..." and "a self-important director's turgid attempts to make grand statements about America.

The site's consensus states: "Val Kilmer delivers a powerhouse performance as one of rock's most incendiary figures, but unfortunately, Oliver Stone is unable to shed much light on the circus surrounding the star.