Flying solo after putting his long-running partnership with brother Joel on hiatus, Ethan Coen delivers a love letter to one of America’s last surviving first-generation rock’n’roll pioneers with Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind. This slender documentary was produced by Joseph “T Bone” Burnett, the musician, producer and rootsy Americana expert who has longstanding Coens connections, having worked as music consultant on O Brother Where Are Thou? (2000) and Inside Llewyn Davis (2013). Coen’s first stand-alone directing credit should be a big deal, especially when it is being launched with full fanfare in Cannes. But this fairly lightweight project is more mixtape than biopic, a fast-moving montage of archive performance clips punctuated by skimpy vintage interview material. All Killer, no filler.
In fairness, Lewis is a ripe subject for a performance-driven documentary. As an explosively energetic stage entertainer whose rich seven-decade career spans boogie-woogie, blues, gospel and country as well as rock, his piano-pummelling baroque’n’roll showmanship is hugely compelling to watch. But anybody expecting Trouble in Mind to feature Coen’s signature wry humour or semi-ironic slant on heartland America will be disappointed. Working closely with his editor wife Tricia Anne Cooke, Coen is essentially a hired hand fulfilling a functional brief here. Indeed, he has admitted he took the job partly to alleviate boredom during pandemic lockdown. Nobody could get bored watching this riotous musical fireworks display, but nobody will learn anything new about Lewis either. Despite its big-name director, it feels like a journeyman promotional project designed for small screen consumption.
Coen and Cooke draw almost exclusively on pre-existing archive material, aside from a brief section of recently shot footage taken from a gospel recording session that a frail-looking Lewis, recovering from a stroke, hosted in Nashville in 2020. Indeed, Trouble in Mind grew out of those sessions, which Burnett and his screenwriter-producer-director wife Callie Khouri, creator of the ABC/CMT hit drama Nashville, initially planned to work up into a stand-alone documentary for the late Steve Bing, who committed suicide during production. Khouri and Bing now gets producing credits here alongside other heavy hitters, including Mick Jagger, whose Jagged Films have a stake in the project.
Trouble in Mind is very light on biographical detail. Coen gives full weight to the singer’s Christian faith, including a brief but remarkable audio clip of his heated exchange with Sun Records boss Sam Phillips about Satan, sin and salvation. But the snappy interviews only fleetingly touch on his hellraiser reputation, his struggles with booze and drugs, his health problems and multiple stormy marriages. Even the scandalous 1957 wedding to his 13-year-old cousin Myra Gale Brown, which effectively wrecked his career for more than a decade, is relegated to a brief subplot. The older Myra herself appears in a later TV interview, defending her ex-husband as a tormented soul, while Lewis later treats the whole episode as a joke: “I had so many cousins I had to marry one of them,” he quips during a 1980s talk show appearance.
Spanning just over 70 minutes, Trouble in Mind never has time to drag, blasting along in a seamlessly edited audio-visual collage. Even agnostics and non-fans should enjoy the blazingly great performances here: not just multiple versions of early career-making hits like Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On and Great Balls of Fire but also later, lesser known tracks including She Even Woke Me Up To Say Goodbye, Another Place, Another Time, Me and Bobby McGee and more. Along the way we see Lewis hanging out with Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry, Johnny Cash and Bruce Springsteen, not to mention sharing blistering duets with Tom Jones and Little Richard. The rocker comes over as unashamedly arrogant, but with a winning streak of humour, some surprising flashes of humility, and masses of electrifying stage charisma in his prime. Coen has made an effortlessly enjoyable film, but Lewis deserves something more substantial and complex than this thin jukebox compilation.
Director: Ethan Coen
Editor: Tricia Anne Cooke
Producers: Steve Bing, Mick Jagger, Victoria Pearman, Peter Afterman, T Bone Burnett
Executive Producers: Michael Rapino, Ryan Kroft, Callie Khouri, Stuart Besser
Production companies: Jagged Films (UK), Shangri-La Entertainment (US), Inaudible Films (US), Live Nation (US)
World sales: A24
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Special Screenings)
In English
73 minutes
