Ethan Hawke Throws a Long Party for Merle Haggard

The title of Ethan Hawke’s new documentary about Merle Haggard is “Highway 99 a double album” — so for those too young to remember life before streaming playlists, it’s worth noting a double album is one that had so many songs they had to be spread out over two LPs rather than the usual one. And you know what they say about double albums, right? They say that virtually every double album would be better edited down to a single disc.

Which you could maybe also say about Hawke’s double album, its undeniable pleasures notwithstanding.

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Hawke’s documentary about the life and music of the pioneering country artist Haggard premiered on Friday at the Telluride Film Festival as part of a tribute to Hawke that also includes the new film “Blue Moon.” It runs three hours and 15 minutes, which is a lot except when you compare it to British director Adam Curtis’ near six-hour Margaret Thatcher doc, “Shifty,” which also premiered at Telluride on Friday. But in the case of Hawke’s film, the largesse begins with the double concepts embodied in its title.

One of those is the double album conceit, which plays out in having more than 30 artists perform Haggard’s songs in between new and archival interviews and biographical footage; the other is the “Highway 99” part of the title, which posits that much of Haggard’s life took place at points along that north-south California road, which stretches from Los Angeles in the south through the San Joaquin Valley, where he spent much of his time.

The trouble is, the double album conceit gets a lot more attention in the film than the Highway 99 one, which barely exists outside of a single conversation with musician John Leventhal about the road’s resonance. Nobody else seems to have thought about the connection and not much is made of it in the film, which is also intercut with footage of Hawke driving his father’s Plymouth Barracuda through California. He never actually identifies where he is or stops to tell us anything about the road; it plays more as if Hawke, after riding in Elvis Presley’s old Rolls Royce in Eugene Jarecki’s Elvis movie “The King,” wanted to make his own riding-in-my-car documentary about a musical icon.

The veteran actor has been drawn to music-related projects in the past, whether it was writing and directing the underappreciated 2018 film “Blaze,” about Texas musician Blaze Foley, or playing an elusive rock icon in “Juliet, Naked” or drinking his sorrows away as songwriter Lorenz Hart in Richard Linklater’s upcoming “Blue Moon.”

But he’s never tackled a music legend head-on in a documentary. With Haggard dying in 2016, the country legend wasn’t around to contribute and wasn’t a big fan of interviews when was alive, but Hawke was granted access to the extensive interviews he did for Ken Burns’ multi-part documentary “Country Music.” (His friend Rosanne Cash had to talk Haggard into doing that one.) Two of Haggard’s children did original interviews for the film, as did Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson and others.

The interview subjects can be honest and even tough at times; there’s no whitewashing going on, but it should come as no surprise that most everybody is here to praise one of country’s greatest songwriters and singers. Early in the film, Hawke – omnipresent as director, narrator and frequent onscreen reader from Haggard’s autobiography – says that he’s making the film in order to “have a party to celebrate Merle,” an intention that comes through in the performance element.

That part, which is sprinkled throughout the film, starts with Dwight Yoakam ripping through “The Running Kind” and continues through 25 more performances. All are good and most are better than that, with highlights including Rosanne Cash and Leventhal’s “Silver Wings,” Gillian Welch and David Rawlings’ “Mama’s Hungry Eyes,” River Shook’s “The Emptiest Arms in the World,” Lucinda Williams’ “Going Where the Lonely Go” and John Carter Cash and Joseph Cash’s “Kern River.”

But by side 4 – and yes, the movie itself is separated into sides, like an album – you start wondering if Hawke stretched out the running time simply because he didn’t want to leave any of the songs on the cutting-room floor.  (Still, the version that ran in Telluride included an intermission that contained a couple of performances that didn’t make it into the movie.)

But the point isn’t to mount a benefit concert and put that on film; that’s clear when Yoakam’s first performance gets one verse and chorus before continue as underscore while the film moves on. Hawke is also in this to champion Haggard, who much of his teenage years in penal institutions and, as he sang in the indelible “Mama Tried,” “turned 21 in prison.” (The rest of that line is “…doing life without parole,” which in his case was not true.)

Side 1 covers quite the range, beginning with his childhood and running through prison, songwriting and fame; Side 2 then backs up into more on his history, the history of his family and the Dust Bowl migration from Oklahoma to California during the Depression, with detours to talk about his obsession with Dolly Parton (“Always Wanting You”) and the social and political stances in his work (“Okie From Muskogee” and “The Fightin’ Side of Me,” which he later backed away from).

His monumental collaboration with Willie Nelson on Townes Van Zandt’s “Pancho & Lefty” gets a hefty chunk of time, which it deserves; so does what Sturgill Simpson describes as Haggard’s “dark, sad, self-destructive behavior.” (Scott Cooper’s Bruce Springsteen movie isn’t the only Telluride film about a successful musician dealing with darkness and depression.)

Revelations are sprinkled throughout these three hours, and so are hits. And more than that, there are countless times when it’s just a thrill to listen to the subtlety and sensitivity of Haggard’s deep voice.  In a way, John Carter Cash is right in the film when he talks about “Kern River.” “You don’t need a three-hour movie, you don’t need a two-hour movie,” he says. “All you need is the three minutes of that song.”

You have to hand it to Hawke that he lets Cash say “you don’t need a three-hour movie” at a point when this particular three-hour movie is started to feel a little scattershot. Then again, “Highway 99 a double album” is just full of lots of those three-minute songs, and Hawke is right when he says that they deserve a party.

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