A lot of rock stars who started out in the 1960s futzed around with moviemaking at some point in their careers, but few if any of them have proven as stubbornly devoted to it as Neil Young. Although his early efforts betrayed little evidence that he had filmmaking in his veins, Young, whose picture can be found in the dictionary next to the definition for the word "ornery", stuck at it, and in the last few years he's scored a couple of triumphs: the strange, handmade-looking feature that he made to illustrate his concept album Greendale (2003) was his proudest achievement as a director, and he starred in a fine, autumnal concert movie directed by Jonathan Demme, Heart of Gold (2006). Around that same time, he once again went on tour as part of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, but with a difference this time. Young had just released an angrily political album, Living with War--it features his singalong ditty "Let's Impeach the President"--and he played it for his bandmates and informed them that "This is all I want to do." Apparently this was not meant as an invitation to put it to a vote. When CSNY was formed back in the late 1960s, they amounted to a full-fledged smash hit trio augmented by some guy from Stills's old band who'd just started releasing solo records, but now they're a worn-out oldies act who are occasionally touched by lightning in the form of a collaborator who remains a vital and compelling force in contemporary pop music. (As David Crosby once put it in one of the great on-the-nose statements of all time, "Neil needs us like he needs three assholes.") Not that they rebelled, mind you: the CSN fellows were thrilled to have a chance to sing about politics and be all relevant and stuff. The reactions from some of their fans, who look like Edward Koren cartoons and were eagerly looking forward to their thousandth chance to hear "Our House", was more mixed.
Perhaps concerned that he might not always have enough reasons during the course of the 19-city tour to tell Stephen Stills "I'm busy", Young decided to direct a film recording the adventure: CSNY: Deja Vu, which opens in theaters this weekend. Discussing some of the audience reaction that he and his three sidekicks got, Young told the New York Times' Ben Sisario, “The Living With War album got such a varied reaction. Extreme negative and personal attacks, all kinds of things I had never had before from any kind of record. But that’s what made it so interesting, and such a great subject for a film. We didn’t know what was going happen, but we knew something was going to happen.” Young included scenes of riled fans, and also scenes that might seem humiliating to the stars, in which they look unglamorously old and out of it, "Because it was harsh. It’s content. This is a documentary.” Although Young takes the directing credit (under his preferred filmmaking pseudonym, "Bernard Shakey"), he did employ a major collaborator: Mike Cerre, a former network news correspondent who worked in Iraq and Afghanistan, whose job it was to record the chaos that his boss was creating from his command center on stage. (Says Cerre, “I called my wife and cameraman and told them I was going to be embedded in a rock tour. They thought I said Iraq. There was a long silence at the other end of the phone.”) The dramatic high point of Greendale comes when its youngest character, Sun Green, pulls off a media event that Young approvingly describes as "a golden moment in the history of TV news," and Young, whose sprawling film-and-audio archive documenting his life and career is as legendary s anything he's managed to make generally available to the public, sees the new documentary as "journalism." It exists--it doesn't matter that much to him if not many people see it, which is a healthy sentiment coming from the director of Human Highway. "“My films are pretty wacky,” says the auteur of Tonight's the Night and Rust Never Sleeps, choosing for the moment to sound as if he were Frank Tashlin or somebody. “They definitely don’t have much of a commercial appeal."