With Young@heart, even Sonic Youth is fair game by Matthew Ralph

It takes a brave soul to even play Sonic Youth's "Schizophrenia" for a room full of senior citizens much less ask them to learn how to sing it.

But that's exactly what Bob Cillman, the Wayne Coyne lookalike who fearlessly leads the world renown octogenarian chorus Young@Heart, does early in a film of the same name chronicling the Massachusetts-based musical outfit.

The result is what one might expect -- confusion and disgust, fingers all over the room being inserted into ears. To the elderly vocalists, the Sonic Youth song is little more than noise, lacking any of the elements that would make it a singable tune in the group's repertoire. The response is pretty much unanimous. James Brown? David Bowie? Prince? The Ramones? The Clash? The group says yes to all of the above without much of a protest. But Sonic Youth? Less than 30 seconds into the 4 and a half minute long song and the ones with the ones in the room with AARP cards are uniformly skeptical.

Cillman, however, is not. The visionary master he is he presses the chorus members to press on, finding their voice in a song in which one member struggles to even find a solitary note. The end result is...well, I'd hate to give away the ending of what was hands down one of the most heartbreakingly uplifting films I've seen in some time.

While having a 92-year-old woman shuffle on stage with a cane, a British accent and a snarl to the roar of an expectant crowd before cranking out The Clash's "Should I Stay Or Should I Go" sells the novelty aspect of the group hard in the opening sequence, the film quickly shows why the pride of Northampton has won audiences the world over.

Follow-the-dot karaoke in the nursing home rec room this is not. Rather, as evidenced by the evolution in the film of musical numbers Cillman pushes on the group from James Brown, Allan Toussaint, Talking Heads Coldplay and the aforementioned influential noise-punk outfit from New York, the songs take on a whole new meaning. Like the Blockbusters "Sweded" in Michel Gondry's "Be Kind Rewind," Young@Heart lovingly re-imagines popular rock and R&B songs in their own less than perfect but none-the-less captivating way.

The result is delightfully uplifting. I teared up more than once, laughed out loud at the candid commentary and the music video interludes of chorus members in an old folk's home singing "I Wanna Be Sedated" or blinged out at the bowling alley with a hip-hop fused rendition of "I Will Survive."

The misty-eyed moments come courtesy of Coldplay's "Fix You," which starts out as a duet Cillman pitches to a couple of ailing former members and winds up being an emotional reminder of how, as one member bluntly puts it, none of us will make it out of this life alive.

Confronted with losing something they can't replace, the chorus pushes forward with the show, displaying a resiliency, optimism and hope that resonates long after the final note of Allen Toussaint's "Yes We Can Can" is sung.

posted [04.18.08]

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