In Fort Lauderdale, Toby Flenderson is a rock star
No matter how much abuse was heaped upon him on the TV hit “The Office,” Toby Flenderson never endured the indignities suffered by alter ego Paul Lieberstein in the opening scenes of his dark comedy “Song of Back and Neck,” so wracked by back pain that he showers, dresses and eats his morning cereal prone on the floor.
After a nine-year run on “The Office” as writer, showrunner and in the role of Dunder-Mifflin’s hapless human-resources representative, filmmaker Lieberstein typecasts himself in “Song of Back and Neck” as Fred, a pleasant but similarly disregarded nebbish, divorced and living alone under the constant threat of another strike of incapacitating pain.
From his humiliating introduction there is, of course, nowhere for Fred to go but up, and “Song of Back and Neck” is indeed a story of triumph — over loneliness (Fred meets a woman), and over pain both physical (he reluctantly tries acupuncture) and emotional (he’s spent 25 years being ignored at his father’s law firm).
Along the way, something magical happens: In the untangling of the tortured communication between the nerves in his back, he discovers they hum with mystical properties, the acupuncture needles vibrating with musical sounds that offer a newly painfree Fred an avenue to take control of his life — and perhaps perform at California’s famed Coachella Music & Arts Festival.
“Song of Back and Neck” premiered in April at the Tribeca Film Festival, where it was nominated for an award for best narrative feature.
“I usually don’t describe it as a comedy, because I don’t want to
set the expectations there,” Lieberstein says by phone from his home in Los Angeles. “It’s an indie movie with an indie tone. It’s very comic at times, for sure, but it definitely doesn’t stay there.”
Lieberstein, who also wrote and directed the film, will accompany “Song of Back and Neck” at Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival screenings on Friday, Nov. 16, at Savor Cinema in Fort Lauderdale and Saturday, Nov. 17, at Cinema Paradiso in Hollywood.
Affront to back
Lieberstein did not have to look far for inspiration for his film: He spent 20 years suffering from chronic back pain, including most of his time on “The Office.” His search for a cure was decidedly conventional — until he was confronted with the book “Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection” by Dr. John Sarno, who believes the cause of most back pain is psychological.
“I was the last guy in the world to think about that stuff. To me it was as good as holistic herbs. I don’t believe in anything,” Lieberstein says, laughing. “So it kind of shook my world view.”
Lieberstein says that like Fred and Toby, he had always believed in the importance of being the cooler head and protecting the people around him from the “general life anger” he would feel from time to time. He was wrong, he says, and diminishing “the value of anger” in a healthy human being led to his back pain.
Within days of practicing what was being preached in Sarno’s book, Lieberstein’s back pain was gone. Aside from minor flare-ups, he’s been pain free for nearly a decade. The lessons in the book figure prominently in Fred’s journey in “Song of Back and Neck.”
“The problem, according to this book — even now it’s hard for me to say with a straight face, but I do believe it [laughs] — is the anger you’re suppressing in the moment that you feel it. It’s subconscious. Our refusal to acknowledge it and let it out causes the pain,” he says.
Hutchison’s sad note
If Lieberstein’s story is a parable about taking control of one’s life by conquering emotional pain, there is no more poignant scene in the film than one he shares with Scott Hutchison.
The lead singer and songwriter for the Scottish indie band Frightened Rabbit was candid about his struggle with anxiety, depression and suicidal impulses in his music. In “Song of Back and Neck” he performs an understated acoustic version of Frightened Rabbit’s “Swim Until You Can’t See Land.”
Three weeks after the film premiered at Tribeca, Hutchison disappeared. His body was found two days later near a marina in Edinburgh, Scotland.
The influential artist is still being remembered, including a Dec. 5 benefit concert in Brooklyn called “Tiny Changes,” featuring performances by Julien Baker, the National’s Aaron Dessner, Ben Gibbard of Death Cab For Cutie and Craig Finn of the Hold Steady.
In “Song of Back and Neck” Hutchison plays himself during a nightclub performance, accompanied by Fred’s musical back, which has achieved minor local celebrity, and a cellist portrayed by Nora Fitzpatrick of Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeroes. Fitzpatrick also appeared on several episodes of “The Office” as Dwight Schrute’s girlfriend.
Hutchison and Fitzpatrick tell Fred that his back, again mysteriously painful, is producing a mournful tone known as a “diminished chord.”
“It conveys this deep, constant sadness,” Fitzpatrick explains as she and Hutchison look at each other. She turns to Fred and asks, “Do you have a sad body?”
As he invites Fred to bring his “freaky, grotesque, beautiful” sound to Coachella with Frightened Rabbit, the scene includes repeated cutaways to Hutchison performing “Swim.” He sings: “Dip a toe in the ocean, oh how it hardens and it numbs / The rest of me is a version of man built to collapse in crumbs / And if I hadn't come now to the coast to disappear / I may have died in a landslide of rocks and hopes and fears.”
Lieberstein had been binge-listening Frightened Rabbit albums while working on “Song of Back and Neck” and wrote Hutchison into the script long before they met through “Office” star Rainn Wilson. (“Rainn somehow seems to know everybody,” Lieberstein says.)
“I listened to the [Frightened Rabbit] album ‘The Winter of Mixed Drinks’ probably a thousand times. There were sounds in his music that made me think about the needles, and was part of the inspiration for the idea that the needles made noise. The music of pain was his music,” Lieberstein says.
The two became friends, stayed in touch via email and text messages, and Lieberstein would attend Frightened Rabbit concerts when he could. The film was shot in late 2016.
He says Hutchison seemed to enjoy the experience on the set.
“He was so sweet. He was sweet and nice and funny. Really present. And he took his music very seriously,” Lieberstein says.
Lieberstein invited Hutchison to Tribeca, but Frightened Rabbit had a performance scheduled.
“We lost a really great, unique voice on the music scene. It just seems so timeless. He was openly writing about this struggle that so many of us have dealt with or are dealing with, and he was writing about it so beautifully,” Lieberstein says. “He’s writing about it, but he’s hopeful. He seems to be firmly on the side of life. He’s battling, but he’s winning, in his music. But, sadly, he didn’t win.”