O Brother, Where Art Thou? by Ethan Coen

If he wasn’t a real person, only the Coens (at least one of them) could make him up. He’s an American Original, full of bluster and bravado, somehow more stylized and italicized than us normal folk, but instantly recognizable as a type. Turned thirteen the next day.”ĭelivering his quick-witted repartee in a drawl that grows thicker than molasses as the years go by, Lewis is a character in every sense of the term. “She wasn’t thirteen,” Lewis corrects an interviewer. The one time Lewis does address the 1957 scandal that decimated his fanbase (and earning potential) and changed the trajectory of a career that would still barrel forward for another six decades, he does with words that sound chilling when divorced from his disarming, devil-in-me charm. It helps that Lewis is a live-wire force with more pure charisma and innate showmanship than just about anyone else on the planet, and as the film pulls almost entirely from stage and talk show performances, we find the singer turning those dials all the way up.

To find fault with that question is to find fault with the film’s overall approach, and that’s fair enough, but taken on its own terms, the doc can be plenty of fun.

If the singer himself didn’t bring up the subject throughout the hours of tape Coen and Cooke whittled down for their film, then what else could they do but move on?

While the film loses little time before addressing Lewis’ marriage at age 22 to his 13-year-old cousin, Myra Brown, nor does it dwell on the subject for very long. Bone Burnett, “Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind” is an amiable and easy watch that doesn’t explore too many of the singer’s more unseemly aspects and, by design, cannot. Where to Watch This Week’s New Movies, from ‘The Starling Girl’ to ‘BlackBerry’Ī kind of a pandemic make-work project the director assembled as he locked down with his editor (and wife) Tricia Cooke and worked through a trove of archival footage offered to him by T.

O Brother, Where Art Thou? by Ethan Coen