'Be Here to Love Me' review

Director Margaret Brown takes a delicate look at the life of musician Townes Van Zandt, with a little help from his friends

By Anastasia Masurat
Published: February 26th, 2006 | 12:24pm

One evening in 2000, Margaret Brown had a few life-changing beers. She was at a bar, celebrating the wrap of Mi Amigo, an indie Western about singing cowboys that she produced. When the film's script supervisor asked Brown what her next project would be, she didn't have an answer. Instead, Brown just talked about the singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt. She'd been hooked on his folky-country ballads ever since hearing "Waitin' Around to Die" a few years earlier. It turned out the script supervisor and her girlfriend were huge fans, too. A few days after their barroom discussion, they offered Brown $25,000 to get started on a documentary about the him.

"I was stunned, but I knew I could take the money and put it to good use," Brown, 34, remembers. They weren't the only Van Zandt fans to lend her a hand. As she started researching the film, she contacted Michael Hall, who had recently written a Texas Monthly article on Van Zandt. Hall was another fan who thought Van Zandt needed more exposure, so he handed his source list of Van Zandt's family and friends to Brown, phone numbers and all.

Instead of luck, the support Brown received is a testament to the impact Van Zandt's music had on his fans. During his 30-year musical career, Van Zandt's album sales were mediocre at best, but his music found a cult following. "He doesn't have non-obsessive fans," Brown has noted.

She'd have to include herself among them. Over the course of the next four years, making the movie became an all-consuming mission. She collected every film and audio clip of Van Zandt she could get her hands on. She crisscrossed the country, conducting more than 40 interviews with his family and his high-profile friends. When Van Zandt's best friend, Guy Clark, insisted they drink tequila in honor of Van Zandt during his interview, she agreed to match him shot-for-shot. To nab Willie Nelson's permission for an interview, she crashed his camping trip while her crew waited in the wings to start filming.

It was all worth it for Brown, who says the job - her first experience directing a feature film - offered some huge rewards. "Where I'm from, telling a good story is one of the best things you can do," says Brown, who was raised in Mobile, Alabama. "I knew that if I made this, I could hear so many great stories."

Her resulting documentary, Be Here To Love Me, weaves the stories Brown collected from Van Zandt's family and friends together with dozens of recordings, including Van Zandt's television appearances, home movies, and rare concert footage. Together they paint a picture of his life, which ended in 1997 due to heart attack at the age of 52.

Brown's portrait is an impressionistic one. Instead of using voice-over narration to guide viewers through the film, she uses her footage to construct a rough, fragmentary chronology of his life. The approach is a good fit for Van Zandt's lean and understated musical style. "Some of his songs are very sparse, and they don't spell out everything," Clark explains at the start of Be Here To Love Me. "They allow you to use your imagination and get sucked in."

Similarly, it is through the glimpses of Van Zandt's life that his personality emerges in the documentary. From his military school days sniffing glue to the college night Van Zandt intentionally fell off his fourth floor balcony "just to see what it felt like," we see the outlines of a charming but unstable dreamer. It wasn't until after spending time in a mental hospital (where he received shock therapy that erased his childhood memories) that he married and settled in Houston, where he began his music career. Working from their walk-in closet, Van Zandt started writing songs. He also performed at local clubs, where he met other budding musicians, including Clark and Jerry Jeff Walker.

From them, he also learned about the musician's life of touring and songwriting. As his friend Kris Kristofferson explained, "You couldn't be a songwriter and stay home." It was a full-time job, one that required leaving the 9-to-5 world.

"There was one point that I realized I could do this...but it meant taking everything off," Van Zandt admits in one of the film's audio interviews. "It takes blowing family off, money, security, happiness, friends...blowing it off. Grabbing a guitar, and go." And so he did. For most of his adult life, Townes drifted from his responsibilities and loved ones as he had predicted he would. Brown, a film-school graduate and daughter of a country songwriter, considers Van Zandt's decision the focus of her documentary. "What do you give up for your art? That's the central question," she asks.

For Van Zandt, living a musician's life meant renouncing his privileged upbringing for far less refined bourbon-soaked days with hippie friends. His nomadic life on the road inspired the documentary's rambling feel. "He lived on the road," Brown says. "I wanted the film to feel like it was from his perspective." To this end, Brown used cinematographer Lee Daniel's original footage of trees, intersections and roadside scenes shot from a moving car.

As the movie progresses, it becomes clear that Van Zandt's early struggles with depression and addition were not eradicated along with his childhood memories. His troubles emerge through the stories Brown recorded in her interviews. In one, his friend Steve Earle remembers Van Zandt playing Russian Roulette right in front of him. In another, musician David Olney recalls attending a disasterous Van Zandt concert in which he was unable to sing or play his guitar. The source of his incapacitation also unfolds in details, such as his widow Jeanene's description of the severe DTs Van Zandt would get from a few hours without drinking.

Van Zandt's former wives and three children provide some of the film's most poignant accounts. In one scene, his youngest child Katie Belle sings one of his songs. In another, his oldest son JT talks about Van Zandt's decision to leave him and his mother for a musician's life. "I think it's a real brave move to put everything else aside and pursue the one thing that you're just mad about," he says. "On the other hand, if you have a personality that's susceptible to addiction, then it's a real good excuse."

Like JT's quote, Be Here To Love Me endeavors to show the many sides of Townes Van Zandt, neither demonizing nor lionizing him. Instead, we see an personal portrait of a talented, troubled man. The intimacy of Brown's film makes it feel more like a home movie than a feature film. Some of this was on purpose - Brown says that she wanted to give it "the feeling of vinyl" - other was the good fortune finding willing subjects. Although Brown had no training as an interviewer, she did have dogged faith in her project. It's to this that she attributes her success. "You invest time into something and they see you care about it and they trust you."

So far her investment has yielded some major successes. Be Here To Love Me was purchased after its first screening at 2005 Toronto Film Festival. After touring the film festival circuit and enjoying limited screenings nationwide, the documentary's DVD will soon be released. Six years after that fortuitous barroom chat, Brown has few regrets about her documentary. "I wish I'd asked Bob Dylan for an interview," she laughs. "And I wish I'd been less shy at the beginning."

But, for the filmmaker who recently produced a Cat Power video and looks forward to future film projects, these stumbling blocks are just part of the learning experience. "It was like going to school," she says of her directorial debut. "It's a process, so it's OK."