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NEIL YOUNG: HEART OF GOLD (2006)
Conventional wisdom be damned, Jonathan Demme’s Neil Young: Heart of Gold is superior to his celebrated Stop Making Sense, its marriage of style and substance so subtle and affecting that it stands as a pinnacle of the concert-doc form. The focus is an August 2005 Young show at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium in support of Prairie Wind, an album written while the musician was anticipating brain aneurysm surgery, and a haunting, lingering sense of mortality hangs over the proceedings, which features a setlist divided pretty evenly between old and new material. Young is in superb shape here, whether performing on stage alone or accompanied by others (a choir, Emmylou Harris). It’s Demme’s direction, however, that elevates the endeavor to borderline-greatness, his alternation between intimate close-ups and expansive shots of the stage and theater (all beautifully handled by cinematographer Ellen Kuras) reflecting a balance between pessimistic loneliness and heartening, communal optimism that’s echoed in Young’s songs, which range from selections typical (“Old Man,” the titular track) to lesser-known (“It’s a Dream”). Refusing to chop up his footage with unnecessary edits, Demme lets the man play, to the film’s – and our – immense benefit.
THE LAST WALTZ (1978)
An elegiac lament for the end of a band and a musical era, The Last Waltz has a melancholy derived from both its subject matter and from its director, Martin Scorsese, who shot this superb concert doc during the difficult production of 1977’s New York, New York. Part funeral, part celebration, Scorsese’s depiction of The Band’s 1976 farewell show at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom is an all-star affair, as the Canadian outfit – led by charismatic frontman Robbie Robertson, and delivering a wide range of selections from their catalog of Americana tunes – is joined on stage by a who’s-who of titans, including Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Neil Young, Neil Diamond, Joni Mitchell, Eric Clapton and Muddy Waters. Thanks to meticulous pre-planning, Scorsese’s live footage is aesthetically dazzling, though The Last Waltz also takes detours to studio-shot musical numbers and interviews with members of The Band, who by the time of the show had begun to drift apart thanks to a combination of road weariness and drugs, and whose worn-out commentary further suggests that the film is a snapshot of a moment in time slipping away, if not already lost forever.
METALLICA: SOME KIND OF MONSTER (2004)
Depicting Metallica as a divided, dysfunctional family, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, about the turbulent events surrounding the writing and recording of 2003’s St. Anger, exudes real, unvarnished honesty in its portrait of a mega-band coming apart at the seams. There’s plenty of drama to fill out the 139-minute runtime, from the extracurricular artistic activities of drummer Lars Ullrich, to the alcohol-related issues of singer James Hetfield, to the group’s meetings with a therapist after bassist Jason Newsted ditches the group and the remaining three members are left to figure out what’s next – which, as it turns out, is a long, messy hiatus caused by Hetfield’s sudden decision to enter rehab. Berlinger and Sinofsky strike a suitable balance between respect for their subjects and dedication to warts-and-all authenticity, and if their doc is more rock (soap) opera than speed metal, it’s still a fascinating backstage glimpse of a supergroup attempting to manage professional success and expectations, personal demons, and interpersonal relationships strained by 20+ years of constant contact.
THE FILTH AND THE FURY (2000)
Julien Temple’s The Filth and the Fury is more than just a non-fiction biography of The Sex Pistols; it’s a striking sociological record of late-‘70s England. Temple’s aesthetic is to cut-and-paste archival footage at a breakneck pace, a strategy that’s in tune with the band’s unpolished, anarchic music and attitude as well as the era’s socio-political tumultuousness. Rarely has a documentary collage been so fierce and formally shrewd, recounting the band’s 26-month history with a dynamism that, aided by new interviews with band members (all seen in silhouettes), makes the action feel current, urgent, vital. Ostensibly Temple’s rejoinder to his own 1980 doc The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle, which told the Sex Pistols’ story from the perspective of manager Malcolm McLaren, The Filth and the Fury assumes lead provocateur Johnny Rotten’s viewpoint. It’s just as slanted a POV, to be sure, but the scruffy, skuzzy, electric energy of Temple’s direction, amplified by his sharply funny and insightful editorial juxtapositions, results in a blisteringly honest portrait.
THE DEVIL AND DANIEL JOHNSTON (2005)
The Devil and Daniel Johnston, Jeff Feurzig’s film about the troubled West Virginia singer-songwriter whose music is colored (and complicated) by mental illness, has a form modeled after that of Tarnation, its multimedia biography crafted through a combination of archival audio, video and still-photographs. The director’s clear fondness for his subject somewhat hampers his ability to fully investigate the many issues raised by Johnston’s life, most notably the question of whether Johnston’s music would be quite as celebrated were it not for the fact that Johnston is a seriously unstable individual. Still, if The Devil and Daniel Johnston doesn’t raise this relevant possibility, instead proving content to just respectfully document the man’s life and career, it benefits from having a remarkable story to tell, as Johnston’s up-and-down saga includes brushes with stardom, psychotic breakdowns, stints in psychiatric facilities, and professional conflicts. Not to mention that the musician – funny, charming, erratic, disturbed – comes across as a case study in the fine line between, if not outright intersection of, inspiration and madness.
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Contributor: Nick Schager