A daughter's documentary on her elusive and unavailable father, Ramblin' Jack Elliott (the descriptive adjective, we learn, refers as much to tongue-looseness as to footlooseness), born Elliott Charles Adnopoz in 1931, son of a middle-class Jewish doctor in Brooklyn, teenage runaway, self-made cowboy, protégé of Woody Guthrie, precursor of Bob Dylan and the folkies of the Sixties, a living legend if never quite a household name, never a resident on Easy Street. His life story is an interesting one; his strong-jawed face a rakishly photogenic one at every stage along the road; his sick-dog singing voice a haunting one. Aiyana Elliott, in pursuit of him, flits back and forth in time, going through the story in tenaciously chronological order (with help from home movies, family photos, publicity stills, TV clips), but interrupting it to follow her subject on his present peregrinations, and to interview his friends, relatives, ex-wives, and colleagues: Arlo Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Odetta, Kris Kristofferson, but notably no Dylan. (Elliott's rendition of "Don't Think Twice," dropped into the tale at the point of his falling-out with Dylan, is intensely moving.) The director does not, to her own satisfaction, get her subject to sit still for a nice long heart-to-heart: "I can't ever remember having an actual conversation with my dad." But the needs of the casual viewer are different, and are well met. (2000) — Duncan Shepherd