Wonderfully offbeat film!

This is ultimately a movie about the very bad things that can happen when we don't address our unease, when we just try to brush it off, whether that's to fit in or to preserve our self-image.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

I'm watching and listening as I write this review.I guess I've been a "closet" Neil Young fan for years. I often wondered how someone with a voice that didn't have resonance and was a bit tinny and nasal, could capture my interest.Mr. Young keeps me coming back to this documentary. He's brought a few of his friends, and does a superb job of keeping the audience entertained. For me, country and folk don't always mix, but Neil and his friends do an incredible job of taking both and making them into two hours of great music.I was especially taken by "Old Man", and my favorite song of all time "Four Strong Winds. Neil's rendition of "Four Strong Winds" is right up there with Ian Tyson's and Brenda Fricker's version.Jonathan Demme's camera positions and movement between the performers adds a great deal of warmth, and the cast seems to be singing to the viewer. They all seem to really enjoy bringing the music to us.The only sadness I note, is the passing of Rick Rosas, Neil's bass player. Mr. Rosas was a real master of his art, and he's missed.A well made documentary, and a great tribute to Neil Young's music.

Neil Young: Heart of Gold (2006) **** (out of 4) Over the past couple months I've been getting into Neil Young's solo work a lot more. A couple years ago I was able to see CSN&Y in concert and Young's performance really stuck out to me so I wasn't to view a documentary and picked this one since the reviews had been great for it. This film was shot at Nashville's famous Ryman Auditorium and from what I've read the concert took place a couple days before Young was having brain surgery and several fans seem to think this was a goodbye concert in case he didn't make it. The first nine songs are all from Young's 'Prairie Wind' album, which I've never listened to so hearing them in this concert was my first time. I really thought the songs were very good, although they were certainly depressing and you can see some pain in Young's eyes as he is singing them. The second part of the film is when we get some of the classic songs including 'Old Man', 'I Am a Child', 'Heart of Gold' and a downright terrific 'Harvest Moon'. There's some brief interview footage at the start of the film but the rest of the movie is Young doing his thing and he delivers a terrific show. There are countless times where Young stops and tells some stories, which are all very funny including one dealing with his daughter. Demme does a brilliant job at not trying to make the film too flashy. He takes the music and moves the camera to capture that mood. Emmylou Harris is also on hand playing guitar and background vocals.

I've never been much of a Neil Young fan. This may be because it seems to be some of his worst material that has become best known, such as the patronizing "Southern Man" and the sappy "Heart of Gold" (the lyrics of which have always made me gag).This movie may not quite have made me a fan, but it has raised my opinion of Neil by a few notches, and of Demme by several. This is everything a concert film should be - focused on the music and the performance, with a minimum of distraction. There are no audience shots, thankfully, and interviews are limited to a few minutes at the beginning, just enough to let us meet the performers we'll be spending the next 90 minutes with. The DVD comes with the lyrics on subtitles, which should be standard on all concert films and videos, but unfortunately is still rare. This movie could be a template for all concert films and videos to come. I just wish they'd called it something other than "Heart of Gold."

Neil Young turned 60 last year. It was not his easiest year. His father died, a man very dear to Young, the man who really started Young on his long musical career when he gave him an Arthur Godfrey ukulele when he was seven or so. To make a grievous year worse, Young was discovered to have a life threatening cerebral aneurysm and required two surgical procedures to correct it, operations that were sandwiched in between recording sessions for his newest album, "Prairie Wind." Nevertheless, he came back and, surrounded by his longtime favorite musician friends and others, gave a whale of a pair of concerts on August 18 and 19, 2005, at Nashville's fabled Ryman Auditorium, home to the Grand Ole Opry from 1943 to 1974. Jonathan Demme and a first rate camera crew shot the show, and this film is the result.Demme, better known to many for his narrative films, like "The Silence of the Lambs," "Philadelphia" and "Beloved," brings plenty of experience to making performance films as well. In 1984 he collaborated with David Byrne and Talking Heads to make the highly regarded concert film, "Stop Making Sense," and in 1998 he filmed a concert by Brit folk-soft rocker Robyn Hitchcock, "Storefront Hitchcock." He also filmed the late monologist Spalding Gray's "Swimming to Cambodia" in 1987, and has made short performance films and videos with Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen. "Heart of Gold" opens with brief, informal interview segments with several of the band members and a few glimpses of Nashville in the vicinity of The Ryman. Then we cut to the chase, the concert itself, which has two segments.In the first part, Young and his band perform all but one of the 10 numbers on the "Prairie Wind" album; after that, there's a series of Young's past hits. There's just one song written by somebody else, Young's fellow Canadian Ian Tyson's wistful 1963 ballad, "Four Strong Winds," which Young tells the audience was an inspiration to him when he was getting started in music at age 17 or so. The concert is beautiful in every respect. Young still can deliver in his distinctively soulful, mellow, plains roots manner, often shifting up an octave into falsetto, a trademark sound of his. The accompanying musical group and their arrangements are all marvelous.The cinematography, a team effort led by DP Ellen Kuras ("I Shot Andy Warhol," "Bamboozled," "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," "No Direction Home - Bob Dylan"), is sublime. Camera angles are imaginative; the shots are simple and held long, never distracting the viewer's attention from the musicians; and the focus is always on the stage, no swoopy audience shots are allowed. The editing, by Andy Keir ("Mandela," Beloved," "The Secret Lives of Dentists," "Off the Map") is just as it should be for a musical performance film: not a single song is interrupted even once. Stage backdrops in lovely colors - muted yellows and ochres – enhance the visual effects.The concert nicely balanced the new with the old in Young's music. If the fresh songs from "Prairie Wind" don't include any obvious blockbuster hits in the making, the uniform virtuosity with which they are written and delivered indicates that Young's talent is still very much intact. Before a song inspired by his 21 year old daughter, Young says he used to write numbers like this for women his own age when he was young, and "I've still got a few left in me." Maybe I'm starting a new genre now, though, one for "empty nester" songs, he goes on to say.Young doesn't shy away from nostalgia here. And why should he? At 60, a survivor of a bad year, with a wondrous songbook behind him, it is that time in life for anyone to begin to be reflective. He talks about his much used guitar, which he bought from Grant Boatwright years ago. It once belonged to Hank Williams, who played it on the Ryman stage in his last appearance there in 1951.For anyone whose formative or defining life experiences were, like mine, sometimes accompanied by Young's music – from his 1968 hit with Buffalo Springfield, "I Am a Child," and "Heart of Gold," in 1972, onward – this concert is sure to be emotionally compelling. For that matter, anyone who appreciates country-pop music, and the images of traditional Americana it evokes, cannot fail to find satisfaction watching this movie, satisfaction we also see in the faces of the players themselves, several of whom have worked with Young for 30 years or more, so glad to be back on stage with each other and with Young, their leader, feeling stronger again and healing.With Emmylou Harris (vocals, guitar), Ben Keith (band leader, steel guitar), Spooner Oldham (keyboards), Rick Rosas (bass), Grant Boatwright (guitar), Karl T. Himmel and Chad Cromwell (drums), Wayne Jackson of the Memphis Horns (trumpet), Neil's wife Pegi Young (vocals, guitar), Anthony Crawford (vocals, guitar), Diana Dewitt (vocals), Gary Pigg (vocals), Tom McGinley (tenor sax), Jimmy Sharp (guitar, vocals), Clinton Gregory (fiddle), Larry Cragg (guitar, banjo, trombone, fiddle, vocals, broom), the Fisk University Singers and The Nashville String Machine. My grade: A 10/10.