Neil Young: Heart of Gold
At a certain point in the new concert movie "Neil Young: Heart of Gold" -- right after he has performed the 1972 title song that stands as his lone concession to top-10 marketability -- Young looks out at the camera and acknowledges the applause with a simple "Thank you." He's speaking to the audience in Nashville's Ryman Auditorium, but suddenly the line between film and viewer dissolves, and the full weight of both the singer's career and this moment on stage seems spine-tinglingly present. At the screening I attended, a friend sitting next to me quietly said, "Thank you," and he isn't even much of a Neil Young fan.
There's a backstory here. "Heart of Gold" was filmed over two nights in August of 2005, a few months after the 59-year-old Young went into surgery to repair a potentially fatal brain aneurysm, not long after his father died, and shortly before he released "Prairie Wind," an album that aches with resilience and loss. The director was Jonathan Demme, who 22 years ago made what many consider the greatest concert movie ever: "Stop Making Sense," featuring Talking Heads at the height of its powers.
That film remains an electrifying testament to pop music as a communal creative act. "Heart of Gold" -- filmed in much the same manner, with pristine sound and a notable lack of audience shots -- is a deeper and infinitely more touching piece of work. Even when Young is surrounded by an onstage crowd of musicians, old friends all, he seems alone. The songs have been chosen from across his catalog to address matters of death, aging, remembrance.
And yet the thing glows. As someone who has always valued the thrash-Neil of Crazy Horse albums like "Ragged Glory" and "On the Beach" over the hippie-Neil of "Harvest," I went in expecting, at worst, a toothless boomer nostalgia trip. Young's always been the trickster of the singer-songwriter movement, though: Even at his most overreaching (the recent "Greendale") or bizarrely wayward (the vocorder album, the rockabilly album), he has held on to the anarchic pulse of rock 'n' roll -- to the idea that "it's better to burn out than fade away." This gives his quietest songs a toughness that pays off here.
The first half of the film is filled with songs off "Prairie Wind," and the momentum takes a while to build because those tunes are discursive as well as unfamiliar. It's when Young dips into his older work that you begin to divine a career-long obsession with mortality. When he sings "and I'm getting old" in "Heart of Gold," the line's like a bird at last finding its way home. When he kicks into "Old Man" -- written about his ranch foreman, it turns out -- and comes to the stanza "I'm a lot like you were," the irony cuts both ways. By comparison, Paul McCartney will finally be able to sing "When I'm 64" this year and mean it, but, trust me, it won't carry the same sting.
There are a lot of ghosts in this movie. Young's father pops up in one song, there's another dedicated to a long-gone dog, and when the singer brings out a guitar once owned by Hank Williams -- the instrument's first appearance at the Ryman in a half-century -- the stage seems to be crowded with shades of the departed. They include Young's own younger self. "I Am a Child," written in 1968 for the Buffalo Springfield, has never sounded so naive or so eternal.
The band includes such longtime sidemen as pedal-steel guitarist Ben Keith and keyboardist Spooner Oldham, as well as musician-wife Pegi Young and the silver-haired queen of alt-country, Emmylou Harris. The members of Crazy Horse are conspicuously absent, but even at its most elegiac, "Heart of Gold" has a resolute refusal to look away that puts the rest of pop music to shame. "I'm gonna thank that country fiddler, and all those rough boys of rock and roll," Young sings in "One of These Days," and in those words, on this stage, the two sides of the man come together like a grateful farewell.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.
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