If you looked at Ken Burn’s 16 -hour “Country Music” documentary when it came out in 2019, you might have wished that every legend whose life was blinking off too quickly to get its own breakout, but Merle Haggard very. The singer songwriter, who died in 2014, could sincerely use some help on the immortality front, especially if there is a danger that the news song “Okie from Muskoee” became the melk he has remembered by … a fate that may be slightly worse than the total cultural deletion.
Thankfully he has found the Posthda benefactor he needed in Ethan Hawkewhose “Highway 99: A double album “Make Haggard right and then some-fox if you are a really blue fan, you may think that even a three-hour plus driving time is not enough. Telluride Film Festival“Highway 99” has a lovely, easy-going rhythm to it, as one of its subject’s train songs, inspired by the days when Haggard was a real shipping hopper.
Hawke keeps the two -part film’s energy and interest to go past the break and then (yes, there is a real “brutalist” -style time -out watch to tell you when to get back to your place), by mixing all archive films with performances from about 30 leading lights from the worlds in contemporary Americana and country, from Norah Jones to Jason Isbell. These acoustic cover songs act as Sweet Chapter stops, and with some luck the film’s title will eventually become literal with a soundtrack album.
All these celebrity guest interpreters aside, it is still Haggard’s magnetism that is the main reason for investing so much time in a movie. It can be a measure of how charismatic he was and is that not just one but two of his ex-wives went back to his band, The Strangers, after decent divorce intervals. It’s charisma. Or, safe, a paycheck. Or maybe his exes just knew what the audience understood: the lid of a poet prize winner who lives to entertain but is not shy with carrying his wounded heart on the sleeve.
The film opens with Hawke telling and driving around Haggard’s native Bakersfield in his father’s old car and talked about how he grew up and developed a love for “The Hag” via the osmosis of dashboards. The natural fear in these first moments may be that the famous director will do it as much about his own journey as his subject, but Hawke turns out to have a rather solid sense of how much he should bring back to the picture. Anyway, all of these bakersfield choir serves a filmmaking purpose: Most of Haggard’s most revealing interviews were only sound, and you have to have something on the screen while the late legend unexpectedly pours his heart into any ancient interviewer.
Nembership by Hawke’s father is not entirely temporary for the main course here. “Highway 99” is partly a story about Haggard’s life -long regret his own father’s death at the age of 9, something he was quite sincere about in memoirs and interviews about carrying as a wound that neither time nor love could heal. Mama, as the song was famous, tried, but the young Merle acted by becoming a fairly dedicated youth crime from the time of that death until his early 20s, constantly in and out of prisons or other facilities where misery became a way of living. Who knows about this was counted as printing the legend, but Haggard is seen that confirms the information he fled from 17 institutions before he was 21 years old.
“I’ve got the shit kicked out of me, and I’m surprised at my own integrity, that I don’t hate people,” heard the star. And the more you learn about the rough early-which included being in the audience at San Quentin when Johnny Cash did his iconic concert there-the lurks, it seems that Haggard encounters like a truly tender-hearted soul all the way to the end (assuming you allow sore hearts to become careless or brusque with a succession).
Haggard could have exploited his “cursed” past for everything it was worth when he became an expert word smith and picker, but when the movie clarifies, he was embarrassed to let someone find out what would have understood as a good brand in this day and age. Finally, it was cash that had him on his late-60s TV program, which surpassed him as an ex-con and assured him that it would be good. But even then, Haggard did not use his poor ass flooded. He is the guy who titled a song and album “I take a lot of pride in what I am”, but also the colleague who sang “sometimes I hate myself and wish I could scream” (in one of his most moving and self -release narrative songs, “sometimes I dream”). Hawke points out that Haggard was not exactly alone among American men in his generation when he was driven by the twin poles of pride and shame.
There are fun things in the doctor, which Dolly Parton told Hawke about the time he called in the middle of the night to confess his massive love for her (which she found a polite way to brush off, just as you would imagine she would). Or Rosanne Cash, who talks about Haggard’s fascination for late in the life of foreigners, expressed in his preference for the conspiracy’s radio program “Coast to Coast” (which he once called a four -hour call in, drawn out here).
But the film is careful to concentrate as much on his art and all the complications that brought. As fans well know, Haggard turned from his groundbreaking and seemingly liberal minded Hymne of interracial love, “Irma Jackson”, to the seemingly conservative “Okie from Muskogee” and “Fightin ‘Side of Me,” and then go back to one of her last musical statements to a kind of campaign for Hillare. A walk contradiction, as Kris Kristofferson would put it? Or just someone whose favorite color is deep purple?
Although Much of the Best Material is Audio-Only, Hawke Did Manage to Get Ahold of the Complete Interview Haggard Give Burns Back in 2014. (Rosanne Cash Explains that he Did it at Her Behst, at a Time When She Thinks He Knew He Was SO and Was Soy So and Was Soy and Was SOO Heartbreaking to hear his labored breath as he talks with Burns, but then the twinkle emerges, and it lights up the screen. At the end of his life, he still learned to be very proud of who he was. Hawke, for his part, can take some in finally giving a hero such a cordial, trenchant and dilapidated screen scented.
