Fearless heart
Steve Earle documentary Just an American Boy is a chronicle of bravery.

By Dennis Harvey

THE SINGER- songwriter tradition has a lot to answer for. Thousands of listening hours have been needlessly hijacked by minute attention to the artist's feelings – which are not all created equal, brother. Therapists must sometimes be bored to death. I feel their pain whenever the dread specter of late-edition, "spiritual" Madonna's lyrics actually register past the beats. For every Fiona Apple or Joe Pernice, capable of weighing the usual neurosis, depression, and bad relationships in genuinely interesting verse, there are umpteen musicians whose inner lives would be better left unexplored – in the public sector, at least. New depths of horror were plumbed during that wee explosion of "Dear Diary" divas a few years back – when Jewel made Carly Simon look like Sylvia Plath. Confessional art and masturbation really do have much in common: both are legitimately hard to resist, yet as a general rule it takes involving somebody else for your act to help make the world a better place.

Not least among singer-songwriter Steve Earle's many plus points is how seldom his songs dally in the land of me. He's a storyteller – one gets the sense he never thought twice about whether other people are inherently interesting. Just an American Boy, the Artemis Records-produced documentary by Amos Poe, is a fittingly unpretentious portrait of its subject. Earle is more down-to-earth than anyone with this many ex-wives, addiction recoveries, and record labels on his résumé ought to possibly be. He's stout, bearded, balding, and equally plausible as a lumberjack or lit professor. He makes being a lefty-activist singer-songwriter of variably rock, bluegrass, country, folk, and blues tunes seem like the most natural thing in the world – which in an improved climate might well be just the case.

Of course, our real climate doesn't agree and hasn't since Texan Earle first hit the fan with 1986's rockabilly-esque Guitar Town. Then as now, his music was too much to even fit into the onetime Nashville "outlaw" niche as country. A rocky relationship with that particular industry inevitably led him toward a loyal if modest audience that's just a piercing or two separated from Ani DiFranco's. If he preaches to the converted – anti-Iraq war, anti-death penalty in several memorable songs – it's not for lack of a populist touch. It's just that marketplace musical populism is exclusively apolitical these days.

"Don't let anyone tell you it's unpatriotic to question any damn thing," he says during a San Francisco show at one point, post-Sept. 11. Hoo lawd: we live in an era when that qualifies as a controversial statement. Indeed, more people paid attention to Earle than had ever bothered before when he released "John Walker's Blues," a song that dared to adopt the voice of the Marin-bred "American Taliban" youth. There's a difference between empathy and sympathy, which a delighted, scandal-seeking media raced to ignore. Just an American Boy duly charts the resulting flap, its gist ideally encapsulated in the New York Post headline "Twisted Ballad Honors Tali-Rat."

That's one concentrated flashback in a movie otherwise rather disinterested in Earle's career back pages, not to mention his nonworking life. Instead we get a lot of concert footage, routinely jazzed-up in visual terms but offering decent highlights from a vast songbook ("Ashes to Ashes," "Copperhead Road," "Jerusalem," "America v. 6.0," etc.). There's also Earle in rehearsal, doing radio interviews, frustratedly entering the uncharted realm of playwriting with Karla (about executed Texan murderer Karla Faye Tucker), visiting City Lights Bookstore, acting as a 12-step-reformed hell-raiser (named Waylon, no less) on HBO series The Wire, and hanging backstage with his musician son and Conan O'Brien.

Just an American Boy at first impresses as a nothing-special portrait of a pretty special artist. But its agreeable looseness seems more encompassing as it goes on. Like many other "roots" musician-centered flicks, it's intended for eventual DVD-purchasing fans, yet ultimately might make a new fan of anybody else who stumbles onto it. Earle is a solid rather than exhilarating live performer – though in his case steady does win the race. This movie captures no lack of similarly admirable personal-behavior moments, on- and offstage. Blabbing at length about personal heroes – Abbie Hoffman, Joan Baez, Gov. George Ryan – in one concert hall, he responds to one punter's yell "Sing the song, Steve!" with rolled eyes and advice to "get another drink; be with you directly." Like his idol Woody Guthrie, Earle makes radical agitprop seem like plain old good manners.

'Just an American Boy' plays Fri/9-Tues/13, Red Vic Movie House, 1727 Haight, S.F. (415) 668-3994. See Rep Clock, in Film listings, for show times.