Neil Young earned the right to pursue filmmaking as a hobby back in the early 1970s. At the time, he was flush with commercial success, and movie studios didn’t balk at the idea of financing a half-baked flick considering they could probably recoup their investment through years of midnight showings. After 1974’s Journey Through the Past and 1979’s Rust Never Sleeps, Young kept making concert movies long after such peers as Jerry Garcia and Pink Floyd got bored, taking a stab at a narrative with 1982’s Human Highway and once again dabbling with the form as late as 2003, when he turned his rock opera Greendale into a feature-length drama. He’s still at it in 2018, starring in Paradox, an ambling, plotless film directed by his romantic partner, Daryl Hannah.
Paradox isn’t much more than a glorified home movie tracing the imagined adventures of Neil Young & Promise of the Real as they adjust to the altitude of Colorado. Armed with some vague ideas but no actual script, the band and crew whiled away the hours horsing around in cowboy outfits, cracking crude jokes, and picking guitars after the sun went down. When all these antics didn’t amount to enough footage for a feature-length movie, Hannah added a midsection of live performances anchored by Young & Promise of the Real tearing it up at the 2016 superstar festival Desert Trip, aka Oldchella, and a solo Neil performance of his ’70s classic “Pocahontas.” This outlier is included presumably because the song loosely adheres to the film’s Old West themes. Or maybe simply because it was kicking around Young’s vaults, waiting to be used.
It’s hard to discern the internal logic that fuels Paradox on screen, but its amiable incoherence achieves a shaky sense of grace on record. Drifting between spooky guitar solos, sweet strums, and half-remembered choruses, this soundtrack occasionally stops for a full-fledged song, but these complete moments feel accidental, as if the fog lifts just long enough to reveal a full landscape. When a finished song does appear, it has the odd effect of grinding proceedings to a halt. That grandiose rendition of “Pocahontas,” recorded sometime in 2005, is by some measure the best individual track here—Young conjures a towering sense of melancholy as he pumps away on an organ—but it’s too weighty for an album that is determined to blow away on the wind. Instead, the song that sums up the album’s charms is an airy version of Willie Nelson’s “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground” sung by Nelson’s son Lukas. Never intended for camera, the film crew captured the group killing time between camera setups by playing the tune: It is a fleeting moment that just happened to be preserved.
Such transience is at the core of Paradox. During the movie, the prominence of Promise of the Real feels overwhelming, as they prance, crack wise in an outhouse, and discover new ways to mug for the camera. On the soundtrack, their equal footing feels necessary, since they not only invigorate Young—just listen to the spry, winding 10-minute “Cowgirl Jam,” where it’s clear Neil gets a thrill playing with a unit far more nimble than Crazy Horse—but are sympathetic to his old hippie pipe dreams, as they ramble on their acoustic guitars and pluck out dusty blues. Paradox exists as a conduit between a dreamed history and a fantasized future, a place formed of nothing more than fragments that evoke a past that seems more mysterious than the present. If the end result is as light as a feather or as memorable as a breeze, that’s also the point.
