The lion’s share of the songs performed in the two concerts captured in Jonathan Demme’s loving documentary “Neil Young: Heart of Gold” are new.
But the news gets sweeter: While the works from Young’s “Prairie Wind” album are fresh, they are also exquisitely vintage.
With expansive intimacy and deceptively simple songwriting, they remind us that this is the singer-songwriter who beguiled with “Heart of Gold,” and “Needle and the Damage Done.”
Diagnosed with a brain aneurysm last spring, Young set to writing “Prairie Wind.”
That sonic journey of shifting moods and mortal reckoning was released in September. It’s performed in its entirety in Demme’s unadorned gift of a movie.
Take note of the date of the first concert at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium (original home of the Grand Ole Opry) – Aug. 19. It’s hard to ignore the urgency of this gritty orchestral happening coming not long after his successful surgery.
As intriguing a subject as Young the man would make, “Heart of Gold” is not a biography. A concert movie, it begins with a gathering of the tribe, Young’s longtime band members and some special guests performers, including Emmylou Harris and wife Pegi Young.
En route to the Ryman, the musicians have their say on various topics. Looking like Col. Sanders gone hip, Grant Boatwright recalls the music pilgrimages his family would take from Alabama to Nashville. Harris mourns news that a high-rise might soon block the sunlight that streams into the Ryman.
Once the movie enters the hallowed hall, you feel her pain.
Young’s voice always has had its own timbre: plaintive, vaguely nasal, wholly original. And the movie’s mix of the new and the beloved familiar provide an extended opportunity for pleasure, mourning and reflection.
Shouldn’t the honoring take place long before the eulogies start?
A righteously humble rendition of the personal hymn “When God Made Me” – backed up with the Fisk University Jubilee Singers – is one of the high points of the new material.
As for the aged but hardly worn, Young’s “Old Man” aches more than ever.
“Old man look at my life, I’m a lot like you were.” Before dipping into those bittersweet lyrics, Young shares the story about who he wrote the song for: A caretaker who lived on the ranch Young bought when his songs made him successful. Or, as he told the guy, “lucky.”
His onstage anecdotes tend to end midtale; he finishes them off with a song. And few examples of multitasking endear quite the way Young’s do. Sitting onstage, he shakes the water from his harmonica, strums his guitar, and begins blowing a high-plains sound.
Sixty years old, Young isn’t young any longer. Neither are many of us first moved by his strange and awesome voice. His talk of parents dying, of children growing independent, of his own “daddy” struggling with dementia will resonate.
Yet Demme has made a film that should lure any listener still stunned by the power of American roots music to heal and rend all at once.
While Young is the man of the hour, his band and his backup singers express their own forceful magic. Demme captures their craft not with flash or quick edits. There’s no attempt to gild this lily.
Cinematographer Ellen Kuras shuts the eyes of her cameras to pause between songs, evoking that smooth black groove between tracks on a piece of vinyl.
Like its troubadour, “Heart of Gold” is smart and generous with its seeming simplicity.
Film critic Lisa Kennedy can be reached at 303-820-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com.
*** | “Neil Young: Heart of Gold”
PG for some drug-related lyrics|1 hour, 43 minutes|MUSIC DOCUMENTARY| Produced and directed by Jonathan Demme; photography by Ellen Kuras; featuring Neil Young, Emmylou Harris, Ben Keith, Spooner Oldham, Rick Rosas, Karl Himmel, Chad Cromwell, Wayne Jackson, Pegi Young, Grant Boatwright, Diana DeWitt, Gary Pigg, Anthony Crawford, Tom McGinley, Jimmy Sharp, Clinton Gregory and the Fisk University Jubilee Singers | Opens today at the Mayan.
