Crazy Horse

Jim Jarmusch's low-tech tribute to the 30-year-old collaboration between grunge godfather Neil Young and his favorite garage band, Crazy Horse, is both a quirky little movie and a monument to one of rock & roll's greatest noisemakers. Partially culled from some gritty archival material shot in 1976 and 1986, and supplemented by lots of super-8 footage of Young and Crazy Horse between shows while on a concert tour (the concert footage itself appears to be shot on 16mm), Year of the Horse is very much like one of the band's paradoxical performances: epic but transitory, ragged but direct, focused but improvisational. Jarmusch understands Crazy Horse and its quixotic musical quest too well to embalm them in a conventional profile-and-performance "rockumentary." Instead, he honors the off-and-on marriage of Young and the others by treating the various chapters of their lives together as shadows in time, fleeting glimpses of a brotherhood that has no secrets. Jarmusch devotes some time to the ghosts in this film--Danny Whitten, Crazy Horse's original guitarist, and the band's late manager--then disperses them with eerie, soundless footage of black-and-white shapes that flutter off into their own void. It's the same poetic dance of light and shadow that caught Jarmusch's fancy in Stranger Than Paradise and Dead Man, but here--as with Neil Young and Crazy Horse at their musical best--it is pure in its essence, nonliteral, pouring in from some fount of raw discovery and inspiration. Exciting stuff, as are performances of band workhorses such as "Sedan Delivery" and the gorgeous "Like a Hurricane." --Tom Keogh