
Neil Young: Heart of Gold
Jonathan Demme's camera stays close on Neil Young for two nights at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium, the old Grand Ole Opry hall, as he plays his album Prairie Wind start to finish before closing with older favorites. The band around him includes longtime collaborators Ben Keith and Spooner Oldham, plus harmony vocals from Emmylou Harris, and the arrangement is stripped down enough that you can hear the room. Young talks between songs about his father's recent death and his own health scare, a brain aneurysm that put the Prairie Wind sessions in a different light, and the film lets those remarks sit rather than cutting away to commentary. Demme shoots it like a chamber piece rather than a stadium show, favoring faces and hands over wide crowd shots, and the Ryman's wood pews and stained glass give the performance a churchlike stillness. There is no narrator and no biography track laid over the top, just two nights of music presented in full.