Director, or on this occasion documentarist, Jonathan Demme fumbles through ten minutes of perfunctory interviews with the headliner and his fellow musicians, wretchedly shot in the interiors of cars and elevators, before settling down for nearly an hour and a half of well-recorded concert footage at the Ryman in Nashville. Reflective of the recent loss of his father and his own brush with a brain aneurysm, it is a mostly mellow set, even a melancholy one, a conspectus of new Young and old Young, with the now jowly, scowly singer squeezing out that effortful, painful, soulful voice from beneath a classic Good Guy's white cowboy hat. (Which changes to a tan hat, still that of a Good Guy, midway through: the film was shot over two nights.) His accompaniment encompasses, in varying combinations, bass guitar, dobro, keyboard, percussion, horns, strings, and backup singers. One of these last, Emmylou Harris, joins him on two duets, of which "This Old Guitar," a song about and performed on an instrument handed down from Hank Williams, is some sort of high point. "When God Made Me," a soft-sell, Socratic appeal for tolerance, with the singer at the keyboard for the only time and a silhouetted chorus behind him, tops it. Young, to be sure, is amply documented on film, notably in Jim Jarmusch's Year of the Horse from the late Nineties and his self-directed Rust Never Sleeps and Journey through the Past from the Seventies. The rabid will need no urging to see the latest addition. The more tepid might require assurance that if they were to limit themselves to just one, this should be it. Let them be assured. (2006) — Duncan Shepherd
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