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Brown's Intruder in the Dust is the basis, Tavernier is concurrent with 'Round Midnight. The artist at the sepia carrefour, the recording in a humble hotel room gives way to a teenager's cassette player decades later. In the Harlem nursing home lies the last link to the Delta blues, Joe Seneca with eyes brimming with rue and mischief from behind thick glasses, snow-bearded, irascible, highly amused at the aspiring guitarist (Ralph Macchio) pestering him for a lost Robert Johnson tune. (Asked about his harmonica's historical significance, he shrugs: "Where I come from, you don't blow no harp, you don't get no pussy.") Their trip to Mississippi has its rewards, "mileage" for the youth and a way out of a Faustian contract for the old-timer. "That ain't the way the song goes!" Walter Hill back in Hard Times terrain, the Deep South of folklore and robust fusions of music and genre. The great divide, a roisterous saloon run by Harry Carey Jr. on one side and on the other a Black barrelhouse that takes in "Lightning Boy and Blind Dog," suspiciously at first and then exultantly. "Just one more white kid ripping off our music," painful experience cracks the cocky pose after the hard-boiled runaway (Jami Gertz) leaves and the lad channels his heartbreak into his strings. "Blues ain't nothing but a good man feeling bad thinking about the woman he was once with." It all builds to a metaphysical showdown under the watch of Beelzebub himself (Robert Judd), Steve Vai as the shredding foe might be Paganini redivivus. ("Excellence in primitive music is cultural," scoffs a Juilliard snob at the slide-guitar Mozart.) Eastwood in Bird returns the compliment to Honkytonk Man. With Joe Morton, Dennis Lipscomb, John Hancock, Tim Russ, Allan Arbus, and Gretchen Palmer.
--- Fernando F. Croce |