Townes Van Zandt: Be Here To Love Me (Palm Pictures)
by Marc Hirsh

originally published in Amplifier, March-April 2006

Townes Van Zandt, who died of heart failure at 52 in 1997, was a songwriter that other songwriters held in awe, and Be Here To Love Me will not tell you why. As a film about music, it fails miserably by succumbing to the same flaw that dogged another film about unsung musicians, Buena Vista Social Club: it denies its audience the opportunity to hear a single song from start to finish (a lapse that might be rectified by the DVD bonus features, which weren’t available for review). It’s an approach that defines Margaret Brown’s film. Instead of a history, it provides a chronological series of anecdotes from family and friends like Steve Earle, Kris Kristofferson and, in spirited interviews that hint at a deeper picture of Van Zandt that Brown never shows us, Guy Clark. With Van Zandt’s music and backstory both fragmented, what’s left is an impressionistic view of a child of privilege who discovered hallucinogens and Bob Dylan in high school and set off on a folk music career dogged by the same self-destructive tendencies that characterized everything else he did. In an archived interview, he explains an early incident where he jumped out of a fourth-story window at a party by saying, “I decided I was going to lean over just to see what it felt like, all the way up to and approaching when you lost control, when you were falling. And I realized that to do it, you know, I would have to fall.” Van Zandt turned that into a personal philosophy, so that by the time he gets into an avoidable accident on the eve of a potentially big tour with John Lee Hooker, it’s just one more bridge he’s burned to watch the smoke. Be Here To Love Me is tantalizing, but it lacks a narrative solid enough to provide either an understanding or an appreciation of its subject.

Back to reviews