Daryl Hannah has made another film (after Paradox in 2018) about her musician husband Neil Young; this one is about his recent 15-date solo tour of outdoor arenas on the US west coast. It works best when the living legend is on stage, cheerfully and unselfconsciously performing just like it’s 1972 and regaling the whooping audience with his comments: “Steve Stills gave me this guitar – I wrote a lot of songs on this sucker!”; “I’m so happy I was here before AI was born!” He really is utterly open and unpretentious.
But the movie itself tests the fanbase loyalty to the limits by being pointlessly and uninterestingly shot in arthouse black-and-white (though it exasperatingly bleeds out into colour over the closing credits) and by including an awful lot of material on the tour bus which is – how to put this? – not very interesting. Neil likes to ride up front with the driver, Jerry Don Borden by name, who becomes almost this film’s star. Bafflingly, Hannah uses a huge amount of tour bus footage from a locked-off camera position, not next to Neil, but at the driver’s seat right by Jerry, whose beaming face and steering wheel loom into the screen almost interminably. At one stage, we hear from him at some length on the subject of Howard Hughes, while Neil nods along, way in the background.
Though Jerry Don Borden is undoubtedly a nice guy, he’s frankly not who we’ve come to see. The other vital aspect of Neil’s backstage/tour bus existence, and the personal story that this director is uniquely qualified to tell – namely, his and Hannah’s relationship – is more or less completely absent, because Hannah is behind the camera and can’t or won’t find a way to turn her camera on herself and her own part in Neil’s life. Yet it’s always good to witness Young’s authentic acoustic presence.
• Neil Young: Coastal is in cinemas on 17 April for one night only.
