It probably says something, in spite of their public comments to the contrary, about the severity of the Coen Brothers’ break-up that each of them has proceeded to make a movie that you not only can’t imagine them making together, but that is so easily classifiable — after all, “Shakespeare adaptation” and “musical bio-doc” are two of the most venerable film types of today. The only genre you could safely consign them to before now was their own; they made “Coen Brothers movies,” and everyone knew what that meant, even if they couldn’t precisely pinpoint it. Joel’s Shakespeare adaptation, “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” at least offered up a sense of energy and enthusiasm, the filmmaker taking the durable text as license for wild visual and aural exploration. Ethan’s “Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind” barely feels like a movie at all.
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It opens with its subject just doing a song, “She Even Woke Me Up to Say Goodbye,” on “The Ed Sullivan Show” – not a big hit, or even a signature tune in his most recognizable style, but a slow, mellow ballad, seeming to tee up a contemplative look at a long, full life. The sound of Elvis propelled him to Memphis, Lewis explains in the first of several lightning-fast archival interview montages, where he made his way to Presley’s home base of Sun Studios and its mastermind Sam Phillips. His first two hits, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ and ”Great Balls of Fire,” topped every chart – rock, R&B, country, you name it (“Any charts they had,” he beams, “the record was #1.”)
Coen tees up a vintage TV performance of “Whole Lotta Shakin’,” and lets it play to better convey the cause of his quick and intense stardom — and you get it because he’s electrifying. He sings this song like he’s burning a house down. But he fell as quickly as he rose when his marriage to his 13-year-old cousin Myra put him in show biz jail for about a dozen years. He kept playing and touring and found success again around 1968, this time as a country act; “I had to change somethin’,” he joked, because “I couldn’t get no airplay.” But he survived that stint in the wilderness with his considerable self-confidence intact. Asked why he never wanted an opening act, he replies, “I really don’t think there’s anybody qualified.”
Those are the broad facts of Lewis’s life, and Coen takes a roundabout approach to conveying them; based on where in his story the picture starts, Lewis’s life apparently began when he heard Elvis, which isn’t that much of a stretch. The film only backs up to his childhood— his convoluted family tree, learning to play the piano, his musical influences— much later, which fills in the blanks both biographically and musically. He compares hearing old-time blues music at his hometown nightclub to going to Heaven while digging into the importance of revival meetings and gospel music to fully share the recipe to the stew that was his sound.
The film’s second half sticks less to chronological than thematic concerns. There is some discussion of his complicated Christianity, notably in the film’s most innovative and inspired sequence, in which the audio of a gospel performance is intercut with in-studio recordings of a spirited conversation about faith and sin with Sam Phillips. “You’re still a sinner,” Lewis tells him, of the “devil’s music” they’ve made together. “You got to walk and talk with God to get into Heaven. It’s what’s written in the Bible.” That dichotomy may be what’s most interesting about Jerry Lee Lewis, that split between his convictions and his temptations, and his full awareness that giving in to the latter meant ignoring the former. This was also the most compelling aspect of Jim McBride’s 1989 biopic “Great Balls of Fire,” and it’s well conveyed here by a clip of Lewis at a press conference talking about salvation, while his sweaty, pale pall and vacant eyes indicate it’s slipped from his grasp again.
“Trouble in Mind” also explores, in less depth, his addictions, his relationships, and his sense of music. There are occasional surprises and oddities in the presentation and some clichés as well. I’m not sure what purpose a montage of people introducing him accomplishes, other than remind us he’s famous (We know! We’re here!). Then at the end, as Lewis sings the title song, Coen makes a particularly odd choice: he overlays on-screen text of Lewis’s thumbnail biography. These nuggets are a bizarre combination of facts we already know (because we just saw the movie) and potentially fascinating aspects of his life the picture could’ve explored and passed over altogether (the deaths of two of his children, how he re-taught himself how to play the piano after a 2019 stroke).
All of the footage is archival, aside from brief footage of a gospel session in January of 2020 (which seems to be present primarily for the easy juxtaposition of this frail old man singing and playing “Amazing Grace” with interspersed images of his younger self, jumping around and raising hell). The ability to assemble the picture from existing materials was reportedly what drew a locked-down Coen to the project in the first place, but its reliance on archival materials, and especially interviews, means we’re always hearing Lewis’s carefully curated presentation of himself – and not from this moment at the end of his life, when one is typically more introspective, but from points closer to the middle of it. The interviews are certainly candid; when Jane Pauley asks him about marrying his 13-year-old cousin, he corrects her that Myra was actually 12 on the wedding day. But absent any contemporary reflections by either the subject or outside observers, we’re left with no real idea how anyone feels about Jerry Lee Lewis and his exploits on either side of the camera.
There are certainly pleasures to be found here, primarily aurally. There are clips a-plenty, TV and concert performances, including several excellent duets (dueling pianos with cousin Mickey Gilley, “Long Tall Sally” with Tom Jones, “I’ll Fly Away” with Little Richard). And in the reliance on those songs, in the way in which the wall-to-wall music becomes the scaffolding for the movie, you can see what Coen is reaching for – eschewing and minimizing the standard bio-doc devices to soak in the music, with a minimum of egg-headed commentary and analysis, merely Lewis’ own minimalist musings. But the editing rhythms grow monotonous by the back half: a couple of lines of a song, a line or two of an interviews, back to the song lyrics, back to the interview quips, ad infinitum. By that point, the picture feels less like a documentary than a YouTube playlist.
Taken within the career of its director, “Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind” is somewhat inexplicable; the only real connective tissue here is the Coens’ occasional collaborator T-Bone Burnett, credited as producer (alongside Mick Jagger and Steve Bing, among others), who brought Coen in. It sounds, on its face, like the kind of thing Martin Scorsese tosses off between narrative features, but his music documentaries actually have weight, depth, and insight. Running under 80 minutes, this one plays more like the paycheck gigs lesser-known documentarians take on to finance their passion projects. It feels like a movie anyone could’ve made, and that’s not something you can typically say about Coen picture. [C]
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