Broken wings
A tender, fun and sad documentary explores the wild life of an astonishing ’70s talent. By Grayson Haver Currin.
Lost Angel: The Genius Of Judee Sill
★★★★
Dir. Andy Brown and Brian Lindstrom
ONWARDS AND UPWARDS. C/S
AT THE START of the 1970s, Los Angeles songwriter Judee Sill made two of that fertile scene’s most affecting and poignant albums, her self-titled debut and setting the vagaries of love and the mysteries of God to a baroque interpretation of folk rock. Sill, after all, was the first person David Geffen signed to Asylum. But her idiosyncratic considerations of the cosmos never turned mainstream, with modest sales compounded by her reluctance to play industry games or adulterate her vision. Impoverished and nearly anonymous, Sill overdosed in 1979 at the age of 35, her life a black box of questions for the generations that steadily discovered her music’s power and charm over the next half-centur y. Were those stories about her early days – hard drugs, bank robberies, desperate measures – real? How did she become relegated to a historical footnote? And where did she go after she made Heart Food?
Lost Angel: The Genius Of Judee Sill is a massive and impassioned effort to pull the lid off that black box of Sill’s life and address those vexing mysteries. Filmmakers Brian Lindstrom and Andy Brown led a wholesale excavation of what Sill left behind – from her diaries, letters and taped inter views, to the poignant memories of old friends – to retrace her life from a tr uly tumultuous childhood to its tragic end. Told largely by Sill in the first person, with deep archival video and stills augmented by animations meant to reflect her expansive and searching music, Lost Angel is a sympathetic, joyous, and regretful portrait of a singular talent hamstrung by her uncanny life.
It must have been tempting to sensationalise Sill’s story, to dwell only on the stranger-than-fiction wildness of those days of hooking and heroin. Brown and Lindstrom don’t shy from those subjects, but they contextualise them as the stuff that drove her to songwriting, the thing that might have saved her life. “Some of my greatest songs have come out of the
“Lost Angel is a massive and impassioned effort to address the mysteries of Sill’s life.”
worst times,” Sill admits at one point. “But that’s food for me, see? That’s high octane!”
What’s more, her songs are not mere window dressing here. They comprise the score, and they are taken seriously, with both Big Thief ’s Buck
Meek and The Washington
Post’s Tim Page offering chord-by-chord analysis of why Sill’s music works its wonders. They don’t shy away from the sexism that surely plagued Sill’s prospects, either, with Weyes Blood’s Natalie Mering pointedly noting that she did not exude the beauty of her more famous female peers. Neither Sill’s musical triumphs nor commercial failures were simple, and Lost Angel raises several questions that lack readymade answers.
Lindstrom and Brown worked on this film for so long that several of their sources – David Crosby, journalist Michele Kort, bassist Bill Plummer – have died since delivering their testimony. Lost Angel, then, does the important work of safeguarding vanishing stories. But it is also an unapologetic love letter to the music of Judee Sill, the sort of public embrace that often eluded her in life but arrives better now than never.