In the middle of one song, Shires throws Isbell a mid-verse wink that goes unseen by everyone but the camera, and he offers a slight smile back. There’s a scene partway through the 2019 studio footage that flashes ahead to some shared time Isbell and Shires had on stage at a 2020 Walt Disney Hall gig, smack between the wrap-up of the album and the start of the pandemic. The ending is never really in doubt, which maybe is why it’s more satisfying than it ought to be to see the marrieds at the movie’s center squabble, with firm evidence of their mutual fierce emotional intelligence and empathy, knowing there’s likely to be something instructive about it. Suddenly it seems like anything might be possible, even a split between the much-celebrated king and queen of Americana-leaning rock. (This isn’t elaborated on in the film, but in real life both members of the couple had at least one night spent in a hotel room.) Later, Shires picks up her iPhone and reads an email letter that she wrote to her husband at their bottom during this time, half matter-of-fact, half heart-wrenching. But after we see some cutting and/or possibly passive-aggressive remarks shared between husband and wife, the next thing we know, producer Dave Cobb is suggesting that Isbell try out some material at home - and the singer lets slip that “home” that night will be the local Omni. Or are they? No one expresses too clearly to the camera in the moment exactly how badly things are going on the personal front, as the recording or some of the most meaningful rock material in recent years seems to more or less move along like gangbusters. Here, unlike the by-now iconic beefing between Jeff Tweedy and Jay Bennett, we know no one’s ultimately going anywhere, right? In this instance, the difficult vibes are between bandmates who double as a married couple - Isbell and his fiddler-spouse, Amanda Shires. It gets more interesting than that, though. Major labels and the conflicts that come with them are so 2002, right? But one common thread is intra-band tension… as it probably will be in most good rock docs now or 20 years from now. This time, as the creation of another amazing record - Isbell’s “Reunions” (recorded in late 2019 and released a few months later) - is put under the filmic microscope, there are no record-company bookkeepers as unseen baddies in the backdrop to a making-of. More than 20 years later, Jones has come up with another gold-standard music doc, in the form of “ Jason Isbell: Running With Our Eyes Closed,” newly streaming on HBO Max. Now, it’s easier to see that Jones’ good fortune in happening upon all that wasn’t all luck. It had conflict within the band, between an auteur and another member of great talent conflict with the soon-to-be-ex-record label, over the basically unwanted classic-to-be “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot”) and said auteur doing his own demon-wrestling, outside foils notwithstanding. In 2002, director Sam Jones made what is widely considered a benchmark for 21st century music documentaries with “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart: A Film About Wilco,” a movie that lucked into just about all the subject matter that could make B-roll footage of the making of an album into A-list material.
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