Neil Young's Close-Up

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Until last year, Neil Young's public persona was a lot like his lyrics: alluring but largely opaque. The singer-songwriter didn't traditionally say much to the audience during concerts and rarely gave media interviews. But a potentially lethal brain aneurysm last spring that required delicate surgery, followed by the death of his father, Canadian journalist and writer Scott Young, changed him. Or, perhaps more correctly, opened him up. With mortality grabbing him by the scruff of the neck (and his 60th birthday awaiting him in the fall), Young went into a Nashville studio last March to record Prairie Wind, which may be the most intimate of his 31 albums. Then he agreed to let director-producer Jonathan Demme (Stop Making Sense, Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia) film two special back-to-back shows in August at Nashville's historic Ryman Auditorium, the former home of the Grand Ole Opry.

The resulting concert film, Neil Young: Heart of Gold, is a portrait of the folk-rock artist as an aging man, in which Demme amps up Prairie Wind's intimacy by several notches. The film makes you feel that an artist who always seemed to be standing on the other side of a milewide canyon is suddenly in your living room. Demme keeps things cozy the old-fashioned way with long close-ups, slow pans (using a Steadicam) and editing cuts that are as sure and steady as the music and musicianship. Some sequences create such an ambiance of immediacy that you may have to restrain yourself from breaking into applause. There's also great attention to detail. Demme ensures that no one misses Young's knowing glance to his wife Pegi, a backup singer here, during a rendition of the love song Harvest Moon or Young's hokey wave to the rafters after referencing country great Hank Williams. It helps too that Young surrounds himself with a team of accomplished musicians, including longtime collaborator Ben Keith on pedal steel guitar and singer Emmylou Harris, who accompanies Young shoulder to shoulder during a soulful sequence of Prairie Wind's This Old Guitar. There's more to the filmmaking than one might imagine. Demme employed nine cameramen to catch the action, and he stopped the "live" show between songs to reset camera angles and lighting. What we get is not so much a concert film as a documentary, and a beautiful one. A case in point is the rendition of the introspective It's a Dream: e.g., a close-up on Young's craggy face is framed by silhouettes of members of the Nashville String Machine, who look like black apparitions bathed in neon gold light.

The film takes a particularly nice turn at about the halfway mark when, having gone through nine of Prairie Wind's 10 songs in the order in which they appear on the album (He Was the King is saved for the inevitable DVD), Young strikes up a string of older classics, starting with 1968's I Am a Child. When Young & Co. later groove into Comes a Time with eight guitars in a line pumping like a row of pistons, Young fanatics and other assorted baby boomers might well descend into tearful raptures. Every viewer, though, will be impressed by the mysterious way the new songs written by an old man take on fresh meaning when sung alongside old songs penned when he was younger. "There's something going on in there that I can't really explain," Young told the Washington Post after the film's debut at the Sundance Film Festival last month.

That something is not in the songs but in the singer. For years, Young's legion of fans has always loved the music but not necessarily the man. Now the chameleon-like Young--who has alternated among introspective folkie, protest rocker and reverb reveler--has morphed again, this time into something far friendlier. The rendition of the song Heart of Gold ("I want to live/ I want to give ...") feels as if it were written specifically for the film, not for 1972's Harvest. Young, in his new balance of power and gentleness, has rarely looked so comfortable in his own boots: confident, proud and resigned to his own mortality. What's ultimately most appealing about Heart of Gold is that Demme captures that state of grace so beautifully.