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By Dan Leone

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'I'M GONNA PLAY some songs from the new Wilco album," Jeff Tweedy, singer and founder of the legendary, rock's-new-savior group announced from the Great American Music Hall stage back in March of 2001. "But they aren't going to sound anything like this." It's one of many drippingly ironic moments captured in photographer-documentarian-superfan Sam Jones's fly-on-the-wall portrait of Tweedy's band on the run; compare the gentle, radio-friendly acoustic versions he plays with the finished results on Wilco's fourth album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and the understatement of that comment becomes hilarious. Jones had merely set out to capture what he considered an important group waxing artistic in a vapid musical zeitgeist and inadvertently caught one transitional meltdown after another: arguments over mixes turn into blowouts, longtime band members are fired, the group is dropped by their label, Reprise, for turning in a noise-filled album that underplays expectations by an alt-country mile. The story eventually ends happily, as Nonesuch, a label that shares Reprise's corporate parentage, buys the album (Tweedy notes how Warner Bros. has now paid for the music ... twice) and releases it to critical acclaim and a high Billboard-chart debut. But the real heart of Heart lies less in the American success story and more in watching the gear-turning of the creative process, be it in the twitchingly uncomfortable fight between Tweedy and cofounder Jay Bennett or the bird's-eye view of the singer vomiting in a bathroom stall. There's a bit too much fandom going on within the filmmaking (one wonders why, after Bennett's dismissal, the sore subject of founding drummer Ken Coomer's similar firing because of "creative differences" prior to filming is left alone), but I Am Trying to Break Your Heart's unflinching B&W eye still leaves viewers in the presence of near-greatness, a sliver away from being a pantheon-worthy Rock Movie. (David Fear)