By Armond White

Good Folk
An edifying tour through Neil Young’s country–and ours.

Greendale
Directed by Bernard Shakey

Greendale is Neil Young’s epic vision of how Americans live spiritually, politically. He’s had several cracks at this material as a studio album, a live-concert DVD and now the latest, a full-length 8mm movie-musical version, which shows at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater this week. It’s one of the most estimable items in "Film Comment Selects 2004," an annual series that Young and Andre Techine make surprisingly worthy this year.

Whatever version of Greendale you encounter, it earns a place alongside the more ambitious expressions of small town living: Winesburg, Ohio; Our Town; even Altman’s Popeye. It’s both recognizable and idiosyncratic through Young’s scrutiny of our most mundane habits and setting them to music that kicks in even when the imagery perplexes. Greendale presents contemporary American crisis as seen through the characters of a white farming community. (A hand-drafted map of the fictitious place–population 25,810–serves as an emblem and a guide.)

Each character is unexceptional except for a rebellious streak running through querulous Grandpa Green; his son, the unfulfilled artist-figure Jed Green; and his restless daughter Sun Green. The film’s time frame is unspecified but there’s tension, from a general world-weariness and occasional news out of the Middle East, which suggests we’re in the present. Young’s Greendale project follows right behind his 2002 album Are You Passionate? (best album title in a decade), which was his unabashed response to 9/11. That marvelous record never got the attention it deserved because Young’s target audience, from old lefties to new grungies, were dismayed by his gung-ho certitude in the single "Let’s Roll" that dramatized the last moments of Flight 93 that went down in the fields of Pennsylvania.

Our already fragmented pop music culture was shaken to near-disintegration by 9/11, and shaken further by Young’s singular, forthright conviction. The new hawkish rock ’n’ roll icon seemed to contradict the pacifism of his hippie-era heart of gold. Are You Passionate? charted a bravely personal expedition as Young left behind his Pearl Jam/Nirvana fascination to engage nearly-esoteric musical Americana–the bedrock of blues that he resurrected with session players Booker T. and the MGs. The album’s raw, sore melancholy produced a lonesome sound that simply had to grow on you. It reflected a long, hard political process, probably similar to Springsteen’s in his 9/11 album The Rising, only not meant to be "official." In Greendale, Young locates the unofficial territory where his outrage and his hope are not so strange. His defiantly unfashionable position gives voice to those Americans who lately feel completely unenfranchised–enraged by al Qaeda and Tom Ridge and isolated from Fox Cable News as well as the Nation. That this community has rarely been seen on the screen in our so-called indie era is a sobering realization. But it gives the Greendale movie surprising charm.

Directing under the name Bernard Shakey and editing under the name Toshi Onuki, Young displays unexpected film wit. Disappointed by indie trendies (Sundancers), Young shot Greendale on film but, in an audacious esthetic ploy that distances him from the many dilettantes, he gives the entire movie the patina of UFO sightings. Blown-up to 35mm, the grainy look is weirdly trenchant, befitting Young’s subject of hometown paranoia. It is neither resolutely dispassionate nor slick like Lost in Translation. (I’m not sure whether Sofia Coppola’s current cascade of honors is for being naive or just for being a rich girl. Either way, it’s pathetic.) Millionaire Young has not lost the common touch; that’s the source of Greendale’s humor and bold good sense.

Grandpa Green (played by musician Ben Keith as a gray-ponytailed Ted Nugent look-alike in flannel plaid and a thermal undershirt with a shotgun propped against the wall) presents a cultural coincidence that Young can’t avoid. But he never shirks it. (After all, this looks like militia land.) Unlike Michael Moore, Young accepts what he has in common with other Americans, even those who are not fellow travelers. When the actors lipsync Young’s recording, the songs gain an expressive dimension. Several blue-notes away from folk-rock, it’s a different but authentic idiom–white folks singing in the voice of the impoverished, a sluggish, forgotten sound. These "amateur" images–sometimes color, sometimes b&w–would be trite if not cogently matched to lyrics that turn American wisdom into credible non-rap rhymes. "A little love and affection/In everything you do/Makes the world a better place/With or without you."

Plainly, Young is challenging U2’s chic piety. His command of elliptical, poetic details was always superior (and deceptively simple), but it’s satisfying to see him find such visual equivalents as Jed Green in jail looking out the window at black crows followed by a menacing news-helicopter, then his view blocked by iron bars. It’s a successful cinematic version of extended metaphor.

Each version of Greendale exhibits Young’s command of American folk art. This little movie doesn’t feel like an earnest Canadian bore; it’s as sophisticated as the art movies of Winston Wheeler Dixon where autobiography bends the verisimilitude of documentary toward the immediacy of fiction. Plus, there’s Young’s pluralized, adopted-USA sense of class as heard in his warmest records (American Stars N Bars, Comes a Time). Greendale is not a town of hicks but of people who are conscious of how the world works, like Jed Green challenging the middle-class art world with his own paintings. Young is interested in the virtues of folk art and this movie recreates the vigor and honesty of "primitive" paintings. That’s not a familiar impulse in today’s film culture but it is restorative, something that cannot be said of Mystic River, which treats the American working class as, frankly, shit.

Here’s what’s special about Greendale: Sure, Young distills this moment of global dread to hippie pieties about saving the earth, protesting against pollution and the politics of greed. But that’s because those worries are something to hold on to, a proverbial politics that Young relates to plain folk wisdom. (One song advising "Keep doin’ your work and leave the drivin’ to us" puts hegemony in a nutshell.) As a filmmaker, Young visualizes those same concerns in ways that recall the political/spiritual anguish of the deforestation and pollution scenes in Bresson’s The Devil Probably. (When Young resorts to showing a devil figure fancily dressed in red and a dashing hat, confusing various characters, it’s too quaint, too universal, to scoff at.)

Most importantly, Young understands that any trepidation Americans felt after 9/11 must be connected to the kinds of disillusionment that conscientious people have felt before. (To hell with all that "the world changed" nonsense; only America’s sense of invulnerability has changed.) Young’s sorrow and contained rage are realized in music and images that are as yet unmatched. The closest I can come to it is to imagine Public Enemy recording a musical version of Malcolm X’s "When the Chickens Come Home to Roost" speech, but ending with Chuck D letting out a genuinely sympathetic, post-9/11 "Ouch!"

Although Greendale doesn’t provide the esthetic elation of Torque, The Dreamers, The Return or Teacher’s Pet, it is gratifying as the pop assessment of 9/11 that we need right now. Peter Jackson and Sofia Coppola have thrown us into a culture of denial–which may be what some people want, but I’ve been waiting for Neil Young to make his intransigence unignorable ever since the stunning Are You Passionate? was released. On that album, the "Goin’ Home" track was as good as a Sam Peckinpah movie, similarly mixing exhilaration and dread, raising the stakes of personal honor to the level of existential choice. It met the grief of Drive-By Truckers’ "Angels and Fuselage," a searing, heartfelt lament for Lynyrd Skynyrd, and whipped it. Young’s social awareness bestowed personal blessing on lives that were sacrificed, not simply taken. "Goin’ Home" was as profound as Young’s love anthem "Like a Hurricane," eschewing namby-pamby liberal ambivalence for a brave confrontation with tragedy.

The hominess of Greendale should be less troubling than Are You Passionate?. Its assessment of how folk-art expression (pop music, home movies) compliments our political and spiritual ideas and amounts to a revelation. Not many contemporary artists have responded to the post-9/11 question of how to make relevant art. Young proposes an answer by emulating the simplicity of folk art: the forcefulness of style, technique, purpose that can be felt in every version of Greendale. Two authentic moments stand out. On "Sun Green," Young sings, "No one could explain it/It just got great reviews." That sizes up the current tendency to praise superficial product regardless of its content or intention. Young critiques the political acquiescence that has infected every aspect of popular culture, replacing actual thinking, ever since the late-80s triumph of capitalism (what some people like to call the fall of communism). And the glorious "Grandpa’s Interview" offers a daring bromide: "It ain’t an honor to be on tv/And it ain’t a duty either"–blessed curmudgeonliness. Greendale’s a modest movie, but it’s also heroic.