I caught two of the music documentaries at the Nashville Film Festival over the weekend, one destined to be a classic and perhaps even a box office success, the other a missed opportunity for Nashville.
I can’t recommend “Young @ Heart” highly enough...
It follows a 25-year-old choir of Northampton, Mass seniors (average age 80) who sing nothing but rock songs (Hendrix, Queen, Talking Heads) as they put together new material and stage another of their sold-out shows. It could have been a cutesy, patronizing portrait of grandparents wearing shades. But director Stephen Walker cultivates empathy with his subjects and shows us the realities of life at one of life’s most fragile and precious stages. And he says volumes about music without ever getting musicological. You can see courage and intellectual confidence as the group struggles through a new and very difficult Sonic Youth song. Attempts to learn “I Feel Good” prove more challenging and humorous than one might imagine. Lyrics take on new shadings, and clichéd notions of only being as young as you feel become almost shockingly relevant.
Over its two decades, the group by its very nature has lost many many members, and in the course of making this film two members or former members die. I don’t think that could have been handled any better, and music steps forward as a salve and a safe place to vent and process emotions. Thus, two performances rank among the most amazing I’ve ever seen. The group sings “Forever Young” at a prison and shreds the inmates’ facades. And the rehearsals and final performance of Coldplay’s “Fix You” (featuring the enchanting Fred Knittle) are beyond moving.
I only wished for a little more background on the group’s tough love leader Bob Cilman who’s done this on the side of his arts management job for all these years. There is some of that HERE at the film’s website. He’s a musical hero, somebody who recognizes music is a force of life and art first. I marveled at how he builds meaningful relationships between the chorus and these songs that must seem to come from outer space. The movie got distribution and opens nationwide any time now.
Last night’s “A Nashville State of Mind” is a well intentioned, talent-filled look at today’s Music City. It’s a stylish picture with a consistent look and feel and very solid photography. It features interviews with a huge range of artists and music biz folks who make drive one point home emphatically -- that Nashville is a great, wide-open creative scene that’s about much more than commercial country music. So three cheers for that. We who live here know. Outsiders too often don’t.
But here’s the problem. It’s 90 minutes of this same information tumbling out of too many talking heads. Literally nothing happens to anyone. We don’t see an artist achieve a victory or a defeat. We don’t see a deal done or a song finished. The film doesn’t move toward anything. It’s a coffee table book. And that leaves me wondering whether non Nashville audiences will care about the film after 20 minutes in. There’s little chance to build empathy with the many artists, as talented as they are, just by hearing them perform a piece of a song. We in the film community absolutely need to translate Nashville’s magic for the nation. It will be interesting to see whether this one builds that bridge.
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