Wild Men Blues

I saw Last Days, Gus Van Sant's creative imagining of Kurt Cobain's end times, three weeks after Katrina hit. Fans are always trying to rewrite the trajectories of tragic figures: My favorite lie has been that what Kurt lacked was a civic crisis to take his mind off the personal variety. Who worries about the authenticity of one's performance, the worthiness of one's fans, or the pain in one's belly when the sky is falling? That fantasy couldn't possibly survive Last Days, which envisions an isolation so profound that not even external states of emergency would penetrate it.

Which is not to dis Kurt--or Townes Van Zandt, Andrew Wood (of Mother Love Bone), and Jeff Buckley, whose depressed and twisted ends are carefully examined in documentaries screening in this week's Sound Unseen festival. I just mean to ask, again, Why? Why must fame isolate? Why must we who empathize with the sad/crazy songs also worship their singer--insist upon his/her "real" sadness/craziness, mythologize it, appropriate it? Then again, why must genius be protected from responsibility? And, in terms of those greater civic struggles that always exist, but are less obscured now: Why should we care at all about these fellows' well-fetishized private griefs?

It's too easy to mock the earnest hagiography Malfunkshun: The Andrew Wood Story (screening at the Bell on October 13 at 7:30 p.m.), especially as Wood appears neither saint nor genius--so I'll leave it for the moment. Be Here to Love Me (Oak Street Cinema, Saturday at 7:30 p.m.), Margaret Brown's adept look at Townes Van Zandt, acknowledges a subject of more complexity, yet it, too, occasionally falls into the trap of excusing selfish behavior on the grounds of mental instability and artistic brilliance. Granted, it's difficult for the filmmaker to balance appreciation and reality checks: The only reason Brown and all her talking heads (with the exception of the musician's relatives) are still fascinated by Van Zandt seven years after his death is that he was, in the words of Steve Earle, the "best songwriter in the world."

Brown has collected plenty of rare performance video and film to show the depth of Van Zandt's talent; there are tantalizing audio snippets of song demos, interviews, and conversations. Alongside this evidence is the story of a rich kid from Houston who sniffed glue in military prep school and graduated to hallucinogens and recklessness, winding up adolescence in a mental hospital where insulin shocks left him with no memory of his childhood. Brown doesn't even attempt to separate Van Zandt's substance addictions from his mental illness, let alone from his "gift"; it's left to his (essentially abandoned) oldest son to wonder what the artist might have created if he hadn't sprinted into a vagabond's feckless life (with the support of a revolving cast of admirers).

In Malfunkshun, director Scot Barbour supplies a pat explanation for Wood's self-destructive behavior: His parents' volatile relationship taught him that "love had to hurt." Brown offers only the smallest hint that the young Van Zandt was bothered by the monetary discrepancy between his family and other people (such as the black help seen holding baby Townes). Exploitative footage of a black friend crying at Van Zandt's "Waiting Around to Die," and Van Zandt's confessed love for Lightnin' Hopkins, cries out for context. Is it only white men whose hauntings are de-racialized and -sexualized as "pure" soul struggle (and therefore somehow heroic and universal)?

Thomas Reichman's documentary Mingus: Charles Mingus 1968 (Oak Street, October 15 at 6:00 p.m.) shows a man in the grip of that same anesthetized isolation, and yet in conversation Mingus can't help making connections--to history, to contemporary society, to spirituality. Sitting around his apartment with his kid and Reichman, he plays with metaphorical words ("pledge allegiance" becomes "pledge legions") and images (helping his white-looking daughter wrap a noose around his neck). I don't mind Mingus's self-pity, because he so clearly sees himself in the context of others who suffer. I'm hoping that I don't find the pain in his performance more "authentic" because of his blackness; I wonder if these other movies stress their subjects' authenticity as a kind of white defensiveness.