'Greendale'
Our town

EVERY FEW YEARS the hills come alive with the sounds of "The musical is back!," wishful thinking that never advances beyond whatever one-hit wonder (Moulin Rouge, Chicago) has occasioned that gush in the first place. Trouble is, the classic Hollywood musical is a convention audiences have rejected for at least two generations now, and no radical new ideas have surfaced (unless "Let's make everything like MTV!" counts, which it doesn't) to modernize the genre. You can't credit the new film by Bernard Shakey (a.k.a. Neil Young) with being exactly modern – it looks like it was shot with the camera equivalent of a horse-drawn carriage – but it is indeed a musical, and it is kinda radical in a way or three. Visualizing the titular CD song cycle, it tells a loosely woven tale of small-town tragedy, a world gone mad, and individuals who ain't gonna take it anymore. Greendale is an idyllic burg (if it looks familiar, you've been to Half Moon Bay) being dragged kicking and screaming from bedrock porch-jawin' Thornton Wilder traditionalism into a craptastic post-9/11 tomorrow. Symptoms abound, like the local gallery dumping hand-painted psychedelia for installation electronica. Worse, good old boy Jed (Eric Johnson) shoots a good old cop under the influence of blow; before you can say, "what in tarnation?," an (improbable) feeding frenzy of glib media types descends on the town as a result. Meanwhile Grandpa (Ben Keith) feels the pain of things generally going to shit, while granddaughter Sun (Sarah White) protests the same – first via a hay-bale "No to War" spell-out on a hillside, then by pulling a Julia Butterfly Hill at an evil corporate H.Q. (which occasions a still more improbable national media gasp o' shock). Did I mention the central family's surname is Green? OK, so the politics here aren't especially sophisticated. Noam Chomsky didn't write the lyrics. But Young's cranky-liberal sensibility, part Garrison Keillor and part twirly-dancing hippie pot grower, is as whole-grain as it comes. An amateur cast (Johnson also plays a dapper, jiggity-stepping Satan) mouths those lyrics and nothing else; everyone channels Young's fabled whine. Grainy, blown-up images, a no-budget ambience, and Crazy Horse stomping in full Dolby glory (one must draw the Luddite line somewhere) complete a lovable curiosity that would just like to remind you what human-scaled democracy oughta look like, dammit. (Dennis Harvey)