Young@Heart

Rating:

* * * *

Verdict:

Doco about geezer chorus rocks out in true feel-good style.

Towards the end of my father's life I was frequently caught up in the nursing home afternoon singalong.

Deep in the Heart of Texas

- complete with its handclaps a little behind what the original song demanded - was a perpetual favourite at the place.

As far as I could tell it had 17 verses. You could take out an entire afternoon with the one song. But then again it's a big state. And it sure made the people there happy.

Young@Heart

reminded me of that experience. Way too much, actually.

Young@Heart

might start off as a doco of modest ambitions but eventually turns into something profoundly moving, about how music can be pure joy in face of fast-approaching mortality.

On the face of it, it seems a little gimmick-driven  - old folks from Northampton Massachussetts get taught songs a fraction of their age (averaging 80) and perform them in concert. It also might seem that the Young at Heart Chorus's long-time musical director Bob Cilman knows he's on to a good, slightly exploitative thing.

It's hard to know how much the ensemble really enjoys wrestling with the rhythmic complexities of Allen Toussaint's

Yes We Can Can

or the fractured artiness of Sonic Youth's

Schizophrenia

.

If they would rather be singing

Deep in the Heart of Texas

they don't say.

But it seems not. Watching them get to grips with those and songs by the Clash, Talking Heads, Jimi Hendrix, James Brown and others, becomes a study in open-mindedness and determination.

There are, of course, some real characters in the chorus that director-interviewer Stephen Walker focuses on, often too closely for his own comfort.

It's not spoiling things to say that some of them take their own curtain calls a little before the finale concert.

There is an  attempt to pad things out with contrived rock clips of the chorale - Talking Heads'

Road to Nowhere

is filmed on just such a highway. If the mock videos are there to patch up some structural problems in the storytelling, the film soon regains its verve. Especially when we follow the chorus  to a local prison show, right after being told that one of its members has passed away.

Or in the final concert when their take on Clash's

Should I Stay or Should I Go

becomes a question of shuffling off this mortal coil. But the show-stopper is  Fred Knittle, a man of a very big, if slightly dodgy, heart and very big frame, who takes the lead on Coldplay's

Fix You

. The hiss of his oxygen canister adds a little plaintive something to the delivery that was sorely missing in Chris Martin's original.

It's a lovely ending to a lovely film, one that deserves to be seen before the inevitable feature remake ruins the whole idea.

Russell Baillie

Director:

Stephen Walker

Rating:

PG

Running time:

108 mins

Screening:

Rialto, Bridgeway, Matakana