I’m not sure if any rock star has had more documentaries or concert films made about them as Neil Young has.
The “Documentary appearances” section of Young’s discography Wikipedia page lists 25 entries that he has at least appeared in, starting with The Last Waltz in 1978. Young docs have been made by such distinguished filmmakers as Hal Ashby (Solo Trans), Jim Jarmusch (Year of the Horse), and Jonathan Demme (three different films, most notably Neil Young: Heart of Gold).
In Young’s later years — he turns 80 later this year — he’s become the frequent subject of Daryl Hannah, the actress from Splash and Wall Street who has been his girlfriend since 2014 and his wife since 2018. She also made docs about Young called Mountaintop in 2019 and Barn in 2022.
The year of their marriage, Hannah directed a pseudo-documentary on Netflix called Paradox. It was a bizarre project, combining apocalyptic images with a concert by Young himself, which felt a lot like a homage to Bob Dylan’s Masked and Anonymous. Young played “The Man In The Black Hat,” while Willie Nelson co-starred as “Red.”
Now, Hannah is back with Coastal, another, much more traditional documentary about Neil Young. This one, released in theaters for one night only this week, follows Young on the road for a West Coast tour, when he returned to the tour bus for the first time during the pandemic and played a bunch of outdoor venues in the summer of 2023.
The film is shot in black and white and looks beautiful throughout. What I’ll say about it is that it’s way, way more interesting when Young is on stage than when he’s off it.
What’s Left to Say?
Coastal begins with a ten-minute segment in which Young is shooting the shit on the tour bus, in front of an ever-present Willie Nelson mug, as he and his driver complain about the traffic in California.
One of the problems with having been the subject of so many documentaries already is that Young is left with not a ton to say that he hasn’t said already. His old bandmate, David Crosby, appeared in a fantastic documentary a few years ago in which he lamented, near the end of his life, that he’d pissed away with all of the relationships with his longtime collaborators, Young included, and he wasn’t likely to fix them in his limited time remaining. There’s nothing like that here.
Things do pick up, though, when Young gets on stage, and it turns out the rocker, even in his very advanced age, can still command the stage and rock a crowd. Don’t, however, expect to hear all the hits. The concert segments, while they sounds great, lean heavily towards Young’s later-career music.
It reminded me quite of one of Thom Zimny’s series of docs about Bruce Springsteen, with a clear premium placed on visual artistry (however, Zimny is not Springsteen’s spouse).
