Picks for Saturday, February 11

NEIL YOUNG:  HEART  OF GOLD   Jonathan Demme’s superb film of Neil Young’s 2005 performance at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium is as fervent a musical homage as was Demme’s bubbly tribute to the Talking Heads, Stop Making Sense (1984). But this new concert movie is also a warm, unhurried paean to the considered pains and pleasures of middle age — as much, one senses, for the director (who shot it while taking a year off from filmmaking after The Manchurian Candidate), as for his subject. Aside from a sprinkling of the old favorites (“Four Strong Winds” — the only number the musician didn’t write himself — “Old Man” and the title song) that made many of us fall in love with Young long before our joints began to creak, Heart of Gold is far from a nostalgia trip. No big deal is made of the near-fatal brain aneurysm that spurred Young to sit down and write the melodies collected on his well-received Prairie Wind album. Still, the crisis is all there in songs about marriage (Young’s wife, Pegi, sings and plays guitar onstage with the band), his father’s dementia, what it’s like to be a “rich hippie” and his empty nest, as well as in those about 9/11, Chris Rock and the golden wheat fields depicted in backdrops specially designed for the movie (and flooded with the mellow amber light of cinematographer Ellen Kuras’ lyrical camera). Along with Bruce Springsteen, Young is our most durable troubadour of the ordinary, yet I doubt that anyone but his wry, endearingly shambling self will ever dismiss him as an old-fart rocker. As much a champion of punk as of country music, Young keeps on growing without ever pandering to his audience or abandoning the old friends he’s played with, in some cases, for 30 years. As they gather onstage, guitars in hand, for the quietly thrilling finale, Demme tracks from face to face (among them Emmylou Harris in all her precise, bony beauty) and instrument to instrument, honoring the collaborative spirit that goes into the making of a song. (ArcLight) (Ella Taylor)