<\/p>\n
The title of Ethan Hawke\u2019s new documentary about Merle Haggard is \u201cHighway 99 a double album\u201d \u2014 so for those too young to remember life before streaming playlists, it\u2019s 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.\u00a0And 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.<\/p>\n
Which you could maybe also say about Hawke\u2019s double album, its undeniable pleasures notwithstanding.<\/p>\n
More from TheWrap<\/strong><\/p>\n Hawke\u2019s 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 \u201cBlue Moon.\u201d It runs three hours and 15 minutes, which is a lot except when you compare it to British director Adam Curtis\u2019 near six-hour Margaret Thatcher doc, \u201cShifty,\u201d which also premiered at Telluride on Friday. But in the case of Hawke\u2019s film, the largesse begins with the double concepts embodied in its title.<\/p>\n One of those is the double album conceit, which plays out in having more than 30 artists perform Haggard\u2019s songs in between new and archival interviews and biographical footage; the other is the \u201cHighway 99\u201d part of the title, which posits that much of Haggard\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s old Rolls Royce in Eugene Jarecki\u2019s Elvis movie \u201cThe King,\u201d wanted to make his own riding-in-my-car documentary about a musical icon.<\/p>\n The veteran actor has been drawn to music-related projects in the past, whether it was writing and directing the underappreciated 2018 film \u201cBlaze,\u201d about Texas musician Blaze Foley, or playing an elusive rock icon in \u201cJuliet, Naked\u201d or drinking his sorrows away as songwriter Lorenz Hart in Richard Linklater\u2019s upcoming \u201cBlue Moon.\u201d<\/p>\n But he\u2019s never tackled a music legend head-on in a documentary. With Haggard dying in 2016, the country legend wasn\u2019t around to contribute and wasn\u2019t a big fan of interviews when was alive, but Hawke was granted access to the extensive interviews he did for Ken Burns\u2019 multi-part documentary \u201cCountry Music.\u201d (His friend Rosanne Cash had to talk Haggard into doing that one.) Two of Haggard\u2019s children did original interviews for the film, as did Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson and others.<\/p>\n The interview subjects can be honest and even tough at times; there\u2019s no whitewashing going on, but it should come as no surprise that most everybody is here to praise one of country\u2019s greatest songwriters and singers. Early in the film, Hawke \u2013 omnipresent as director, narrator and frequent onscreen reader from Haggard\u2019s autobiography \u2013 says that he\u2019s making the film in order to \u201chave a party to celebrate Merle,\u201d an intention that comes through in the performance element.<\/p>\n That part, which is sprinkled throughout the film, starts with Dwight Yoakam ripping through \u201cThe Running Kind\u201d and continues through 25 more performances. All are good and most are better than that, with highlights including Rosanne Cash and Leventhal\u2019s \u201cSilver Wings,\u201d Gillian Welch and David Rawlings\u2019 \u201cMama\u2019s Hungry Eyes,\u201d River Shook\u2019s \u201cThe Emptiest Arms in the World,\u201d Lucinda Williams\u2019 \u201cGoing Where the Lonely Go\u201d and John Carter Cash and Joseph Cash\u2019s \u201cKern River.\u201d<\/p>\n But by side 4 \u2013 and yes, the movie itself is separated into sides, like an album \u2013 you start wondering if Hawke stretched out the running time simply because he didn\u2019t want to leave any of the songs on the cutting-room floor.\u00a0 (Still, the version that ran in Telluride included an intermission that contained a couple of performances that didn\u2019t make it into the movie.)<\/p>\n But the point isn\u2019t to mount a benefit concert and put that on film; that\u2019s clear when Yoakam\u2019s 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 \u201cMama Tried,\u201d \u201cturned 21 in prison.\u201d (The rest of that line is \u201c\u2026doing life without parole,\u201d which in his case was not true.)<\/p>\n 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 (\u201cAlways Wanting You\u201d) and the social and political stances in his work (\u201cOkie From Muskogee\u201d and \u201cThe Fightin\u2019 Side of Me,\u201d which he later backed away from).<\/p>\n His monumental collaboration with Willie Nelson on Townes Van Zandt\u2019s \u201cPancho & Lefty\u201d gets a hefty chunk of time, which it deserves; so does what Sturgill Simpson describes as Haggard\u2019s \u201cdark, sad, self-destructive behavior.\u201d (Scott Cooper\u2019s Bruce Springsteen movie isn\u2019t the only Telluride film about a successful musician dealing with darkness and depression.)<\/p>\n Revelations are sprinkled throughout these three hours, and so are hits. And more than that, there are countless times when it\u2019s just a thrill to listen to the subtlety and sensitivity of Haggard\u2019s deep voice. \u00a0In a way, John Carter Cash is right in the film when he talks about \u201cKern River.\u201d \u201cYou don\u2019t need a three-hour movie, you don\u2019t need a two-hour movie,\u201d he says. \u201cAll you need is the three minutes of that song.\u201d<\/p>\n You have to hand it to Hawke that he lets Cash say \u201cyou don\u2019t need a three-hour movie\u201d at a point when this particular three-hour movie is started to feel a little scattershot. Then again, \u201cHighway 99 a double album\u201d is just full of lots of those three-minute songs, and Hawke is right when he says that they deserve a party.<\/p>\n The post \u2018Highway 99 a double album\u2019 Review: Ethan Hawke Throws a Long Party for Merle Haggard<\/a> appeared first on TheWrap<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source ca.news.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The title of Ethan Hawke\u2019s new documentary about Merle Haggard is \u201cHighway 99 a double album\u201d \u2014 so for those too young to remember life before streaming playlists, it\u2019s 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.\u00a0And […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1987964,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[344078,312614,358388,358390,358389,358387,358144],"class_list":["post-1987963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-double-album","tag-ethan-hawke","tag-highway-99","tag-john-carter-cash","tag-john-leventhal","tag-merle-haggard","tag-telluride-film-festival"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Ethan-Hawke-Throws-a-Long-Party-for-Merle-Haggard.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1987963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1987963"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1987963\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1987964"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1987963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1987963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1987963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}