Easy Rider on the tour bus, Neil Young as Bernard Shakey directs this tour film of the wizened and whiskery super-group taking a bunch of anti-war songs (Neil's 'Living With War' album plus Ohio, Find The Cost Of Freedom, For What It's Worth etc) across America. It's surprising in a lot of ways , but what's not so surprising is that the music is pretty slapdash. Not slapdash in a Time Fades Away manner, more in a drums like dustbins and four guitars sludge manner. At one point the portly Stills puts his foot on the monitor and falls over, though he gamely continues soloing and laughing. As the film progresses the music thins out, gets a bit better and the film gets a lot better.
The point seems to be that The Over The Hill Gang are using their 60's peacenik cartoon persona's to give their audience a different message from the US media's. The Shock Jocks who make irony-free appearances make Beavis and Butthead look like Noam Chomsky. When Neil on a TV talkshow starts into Let's Impeach The President he seems to know the hosts cut to the adverts is semi-jokey, semi-panic. Half the concert audiences seem to be that disenfranchised minority, old liberals who were appalled at Vietnam, sitting atomised in front of their TV's thinking, Where's the Protest This Time?
The best element of the film is when it gives a voice to the survivors , veterans and families of Iraq casualties, in a way that is open, candid and democratic. Often confused and tolerant, often angry and disappointed, they have the gritted jaws of the duped. Neil has been returning to the veteran since Lookout Joe on Tonight's the Night, but this is more multilayered and democratic. They thought they were going to Iraq as The Magnificent Seven not The Dirty Dozen, but, tellingly, they're not the ones streaming out of the show in Atlanta flipping Neil the finger, their singing along " Let's impeach the president for lying." The most surprising thing is that it seems the 4 veteran musicians seem more in tune with the American heartland than their politicians. Deja Vu? Waging heavy peace?
The real star of the film for me is Stephen Stills, who looks like a Pixar animation in a huge Hawaiian shirt all odd facial tics and nervousness, but whose low-key support for veteran Congressional candidates at barbecues and on the stump is old fashioned but (as we learn at the end) successful. Graham Nash is played by Paul Whitehouse as Angry Greyhaired Internet Warrior. David Crosby is quiet, way off stage right and Neil Young is driving the thing forward even when he's not there.
The film ends with an Iraq veteran riding his Harley down a secluded road. Unlike Easy Rider, there is no van load of hayseeds appearing out of the blue to blow him away. Nothing that melodramatic. All the violence has happened a long way away and some time ago. He's been had and he's living with war.
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