Roher literally opens the film \u2013 before any other credits, before any footage, before anything \u2013 with Martin Scorsese\u2019s executive producer credit, and fess up, so would you. It\u2019s a bit of a flex, but also a reminder of the cinematic<\/em> history of this late-\u201860s\/early \u201870s rock America group; their story, or at least a version of it, was previously told in Scorsese\u2019s smashing The Last Waltz<\/em>, which both chronicled their all-star 1976 farewell concert and let them explain how they got there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A few of those stories reappear in Once Were Brothers<\/em>, joined by many fine new ones: how they came together, first as a backing group for rockabilly hellraiser Ronnie Hawkins, then as Bob Dylan\u2019s backing group on his ill-fated 1966 \u201celectric\u201d tour, then as their own strange, sui generis<\/em> thing; the beautifully organic way the legendary \u201cbasement tapes\u201d happened; how Robertson composed \u201cThe Weight,\u201d perhaps their best song; the hilarious tall tale of the hypnotist that got him out of a crippling sickness for their first big solo show; and so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By this point, many of these legends have become the kind of old, loaded folklore that inspired some of their best music, and Roher\u2019s film is at its best when digging into those influences, the heady stew of styles and traditions that their music was forged from. (This viewer, a music lover who can\u2019t play a note, is an absolute mark for anyone willing to explain the voodoo and witchcraft of the music creation process.) The filmmaker makes a valiant effort to convey what exactly made the music so special, which isn\u2019t easy to do in any other medium; the simplest thing to do is point at a speaker and say \u201clisten,\u201d and anything beyond that often amounts, as the saying goes, to dancing about architecture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But there\u2019s a human interest story to tell here as well, of the splintering of the relationship between Robertson and Levon Helm, who was a working musician first, taught Robertson the rules of the road, and joined him in a creative partnership and close personal friendship in the band\u2019s early, anonymous days. And then, as in so many of these stories, drugs and drink sort of muscled in and took over, with devastating effect; ultimately, this was a \u201860s band \u2013 \u201860s in spirit, \u201860s in sound \u2013 that was capsized by the \u201870s and its excesses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The filmmaking leans razzle-dazzle, in a way that seems like a bad fit, but ultimately matches the subject matter \u2013 the cutting and juxtapositions are showing off a little, kinda like The Band did. The musicality of the montage is especially striking; the filmmakers apparently had access to so much archival material, so many miles of old home movies and reams of great photos, that they can literally cut to each note or beat. It makes you want to go home and play Band records, and there are worse takeaways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some of them, unfortunately, are also present here. Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band<\/em>\u2019s primary issue is right there in the title: It wasn\u2019t \u201cRobbie Robertson and The Band,\u201d it was \u201cThe Band,\u201d and the aforementioned, oft-murmured incantation that this group was more than the sum of its parts is somewhat betrayed by this supposedly definitive documentary\u2019s decision to focus, with such laser precision, on this one member and his life. To some degree, that\u2019s understandable; per the end credits, it\u2019s \u201cinspired\u201d by his memoir, and it\u2019s true, there\u2019s only one other member still around to talk to. But his current status warrants only an end title card – \u201cGarth Hudson lives with his wife in Woodstock, NY\u201d \u2013 which asks more questions than it answers. Did Hudson decline to be interviewed? Did the filmmakers simply choose not to? Was this Robertson\u2019s request?<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s unsurprising, though, because while we come away with a very clear picture of Robertson and (to a lesser degree) Helm, we don\u2019t really get to know Hudson or Rick Danko, and barely Richard Manuel. The film spends time on Robertson\u2019s wife and family, but those same end title cards simply dispatch Manuel and Danko with dates of birth and death; knowing the group only from this film, you\u2019d never know, for example, the sad story of Manuel’s suicide after a gig with the re-formed Band.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some time is spent on the late-in-life disputes between Helm and Robertson over the latter\u2019s solo songwriting credits. A friend of Helm explains, \u201cHe felt as though Robbie were kinda claiming all the credit for himself,\u201d and were the film not such a Robertson hagiography, the inclusion of that sound byte would feel like a sly jab. Instead, it just seems oblivious. With that grievance aired, it almost feels like this documentary, and its title, are sticking it to the dead guy \u2013 which is a weird sense to come away from a movie like this with. “Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band” is out Friday in limited release.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of the running refrains of Daniel Roher\u2019s musical bio-doc Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band is that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":531,"featured_media":13452,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[340,1381],"tags":[1098,162,34],"class_list":["post-13451","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movie-reviews","category-movies","tag-movie-review","tag-movies","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13451","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/531"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13451"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13451\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/Once-Were-Brotehrs-TIFF-1024x686.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/crookedc-01.svg\")
<\/p>\n\n\n\nB-<\/h1>\n\n\n\n