Margaret Browns film about the life of Townes Van Zandt, arguably Americas greatest cult singer songwriter, is quite simply the best music documentary I have ever seen. But not because it’s well filmed with some amazingly shot live footage of the man himself playing his music in his prime, or because it includes a whole bunch of soulless celebrity interview footage. This film pulls you in after the first few frames because it cuts you like a knife, giving you a deep insight into a self proclaimed hopeless case who made the decision early on that if he was to follow a life of rock’n’roll excess, family and love would always come secondary to his music. Not that Van Zandt ever once comes across like a rock star in the film, and like my now second favourite music documentary of all time, The Devil & Daniel Johnston, he comes across as a man simply overcome by the sadness of life, but with a true gift of writing the perfect song about that sadness and then singing it with a voice that carries straight to the deepest part of your soul.
Van Zandt was given shock treatment in his 20’s after he had thrown himself off a balcony “to see what it felt like”, thus wiping out most of his childhood memories forever. This tragic fact is most is likely the reason he found it so hard to connect with people except, maybe somewhat unwittingly, through writing songs and playing his music. Friends and fans such as Kris Kristofferson and Steve Earle appear in the film to tell gut wrenching stories of the many sides of Van Zandt, with one of Earle’s being the most telling of how deeply troubled the man was when he pulled out a gun and played russian roulette as Earle could only watch on helplessly in sheer horror.
In his later years Van Zandt seemed to try to connect more with his family and his children from different wives, but sadly his youngest son was the one to discover his fathers dead body after Townes finally sucumed to years of toxic abuse in 1997. With some amazing archival footage including a beautiful performance of his song ‘Waiting Around to Die’ shot in the trailer park where he was living at the time, where he quite literally brings an old friend to tears, this film tells the true story of a man who knew he was doomed from the start and wrote musical poetry about it, and in the tradition of that great mythic unappreciated artist, only in his eventual death from too much hard living, did he finally get his dues. Seek this film out as though your life depended on it.
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