The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack (2000)

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

This was very informative and enjoyable, but one problem. I would have to agree about the teller getting in the way of the story. But more importantly, Jack's daughter complains about the lifestyle her father lead. One that left a gap in their relationship. The typical he was never there story etc. My problem is the fact that she's making a documentary about this gap. The whole premise is not very genuine. I mean if he was an asshole, and your going to exploit that to further your career, then do that. Rather she complains about him, makes a documentary, to me, that proves otherwise. I guess that if I was upset with my father and the career that he led, I wouldn't showcase the very "root of the evil." Seems like she was trying to make a buck off of her father, and in the process tried to force some, "my daddy was never there" story to put herself in it. Which is generally a no, no for directors/writers.

I eagerly started to read the review of Sumland from San Francisco regarding this film and was was turned off two thirds of the way by his biased rambling and criticisms of Elliot's daughter Aiyana...Sumland seems to think women should just "put up and shut up" regarding the actions of emotionally immature fathers and husbands who may be charming performer and musicans but lousy family members...Women don't have enough assertiveness , ego, and self esteem to begin with regarding relationships, they are expected to carry all the responsibility for relationships and then are blamed when they fail...Hooray for Aiyana for her candor , honesty, maturity and sensitivity regarding her father...Too bad people like Sumland cant handle the truth and would rather have women sugarcoat the reality of their experiences that excuses poor parenting and spousal behavior...."If women all told the truth of their experiences, the world would split open"...Audra Lourde

Until I saw this film, I'd never seen Jack Elliott "in concert." I've seen Dylan, many times; see Arlo Guthrie once a year when he plays Harrisburg, Pa., with his daughter Sara; saw Dave Van Ronk when he played here a couple of years ago with Rosemary Sorrels; never saw Jack Elliott. Until now.And what a concert. No back-up singers; no jazz; no fancy lighting; no special effects. Just Jack Elliott, playing and singing and talking about his life and his times and his adventures, picking away on his guitar for punctuation, singing deep and throaty about where's he's been, who he is and making fun at a lot of ideas about what other people think he means. No apologies; no excuses; a living tribute to what Henry Ford II once said: never complain, never explain.It's hard to believe that this film was made by his daughter. It's a true, genuine, open statement about a man who has lived his life with absolutely no plan in mind about what he would do or say or where his choices would take him or what effect it would have on other people or things, but never hesitated to follow his heart, follow his curiosity, outrun his shadow with every step. Pick up and leave; pick up and go; never look back and never let go. Never stop working, never stop playing, take every breath and every encounter and every day and tell other people about it on a guitar. Invite them in for dinner and some stories while sitting on a barstool. That's Jack Elliott in concert. It almost sounds as if his life has been selfish and self-serving, but this film clearly makes the distinction between living a life of greed, which is what drives selfish people, and having a sense of self, which is what Jack Elliott has worked on and what he devoted himself to and has shared with us through his music. He meant no harm; he has always just been looking.The film evolves into a masterpiece of objectivity despite the potential for the obvious pitfall of a daughter trying to understand her father and asking the whole world to watch with her while she searches. What courage. She's made of the same stuff her father is and this "road trip" they took together is made singularly more sweet because they invited all of us along with them.Folk music is all about the stories, recording people and events musically, in common terms and without the frills, just straight up stories. And this film tells a great story and in the telling, has itself become a story.My sons and I are going to a Bob Dylan concert on August 16th. I'm bringing a tape of this film to them to watch before the concert. Music helps us understand who we are, where we've been and where we're headed. Having seen this film, I'm going to listen to Dylan with a whole new set of ears. And I've been listening to him for forty years.This film is an important guidepost in the history of American folk music because it gives us the life's work and "ramblings", up front and on a personal level, of a true American folk legend.

Of general interest due to Ramblin' Jack Elliott's role in creating the archetype of the American folk music hero, given tangible historic expression in his serving as the link between Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, specifically, as the model for the latter's original stage persona. Elliott, fashioning himself after, as protégé of, Guthrie, was one of the first to imagine and create the role of the American minstrel from which innumerable others have borrowed and to this day continue to borrow.This film would have been infinitely more interesting without the first-person intrusion of the film maker, Elliott's daughter, who from the start sets out to have that one heart-to-heart with her daddy she never had; she almost makes herself the subject of this film, but who would see it if she were? The daughter-in-search-of-father theme interferes not only with the objectivity of this biography of folk singer Ramblin' Jack Elliott (1931-present), but it disrupts the chronological depiction of events: the film jumps confusingly between recent and distant past to accommodate the daughter's story, which includes redundant home-movie footage of her as a child. Does the world really need one more egocentric female narrative of the parent-that-never-was, of familial "dysfunction"? Bookstore shelves and the rolls of indie films are already overfilled with every conceivable variant of this bourgeois American-woman self-preoccupation. This domestic mindset is so pervasive that I suspect its root cause is the feminist parochialism of university writing and film departments in which these women were initially "empowered." And/or is this the self-pitying cultural legacy of psychoanalysis? (Faulkner: "motherblood with hate loves and cohabits.")Yes, Ramblin' Jack was a lousy parent, always absent, on the road. Anyone who expected otherwise had to have been totally impervious to who and what he was. The very qualities that make him special, for which he is prized and loved, namely, his unspoiled childlike sense of wonder, the freshness and simplicity of his vision, his offbeat folky genuineness, all arise from the fact that Elliott from the first refused to grow up, that he willfully turned his back on the world of adult responsibility and conventional adult social identities, choosing, instead, to live out the fantasy of the cowboy troubadour, literally running away from his Brooklyn home to join the rodeo at the age of 16. Was this in reaction to the anhedonia of his Jewish parents, the echo of the holocaust in modern America? His mother (we are told) was a driven, unpleasant woman who wanted Jack to be a doctor just like his father, who (we are told) was an aloof workaholic. Elliott Adnopoz--Jack's real name--obviously rebelled against being force fed the conventional American dream, sought instead bohemian outlet in the romanticism of the American frontier, the American West.Unlike Louis Prima: The Wildest, which was redeemed from its adulatory distortions by ample actual footage of its subject performing, this film mercilessly cuts into Ramblin' Jack's performances to editorialize on his failings and vent his daughter's frustrations. Still, because Elliott's life intersected so deeply and so often the currents of American folk and pop music, we are inevitably given a backstage glimpse of that larger, more important drama. His journeys encompassed the cultural suffocation of the Eisenhower years, the skiffle movement and origins of rock music in England, the American folk renaissance of the 60's, and the hippie culture of the West Coast. Alan Lomax, Dave van Ronk, Arlo and sister Nora Guthrie, Odetta, Kris Kristofferson, and Pete Seeger all check in with impressions and recollections of Jack. One could only wish that Aiyana Elliott could have imbued her film with more of her father's casual charm, his gentle whimsiness. The heavy hand of this author makes one appreciate all the more Errol Morris, whose documentaries tell themselves without even the voice of a narrator.