BE HERE TO LOVE ME
unrated, 99 minutes

“Be Here To Love Me,” Margaret Brown’s lovingly crafted new film about the cult country singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt, might better be called, “Waitin’ Around To Die,” another of his song titles. “I don’t envision a very long life for myself,” Van Zandt says in the film’s opening sequence. “I think my life will run out before my work does. I’ve designed it that way.”

Through a blend of interviews, performance footage, home videos, and impressionistic montages, the film tracks Van Zandt’s steady line (it overstates it to call it a rise) from his troubled childhood in Texas, through his years as a hard-living road musician, and to his death of heart failure on New Year’s Day 1997 at the age of 52.

Van Zandt was never a household name (he jokes in one performance about doing a medley “of my hit”) and never sold many records, but he has many famous admirers. Kris Kristofferson calls him “a songwriter’s songwriter,” and Steve Earle gushes, “He’s the best songwriter in the world.”

His best-known songs are associated with other, more famous, singers. Emmylou Harris had a hit with “If I Needed You,” a song that Townes claims to have literally written in his sleep. (He dreamt it, woke up, rolled over, and wrote it down in finished form.) And “Pancho & Lefty” became a number one country song for Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard. The snippets we hear give a glimpse of Van Zandt’s lyrical talent: “Living on the road my friend, was gonna keep you free and clean / now you wear your skin like iron, and your breath’s as hard as kerosene.”

His dissipation, however, comes across better than his songwriting brilliance, and there’s no doubt it contributes almost as much to his cult glamour. Always an addictive and self-destructive personality, Van Zandt dabbled in heroin and became a legendary alcoholic (one friend remembers seeing him shoot up a concoction of bourbon and Coca-Cola). But it was airplane glue, his first addiction, that nearly did him in. He OD’d on it as a teenager when he fell asleep with three tubes in his mouth. The doctors had to break his teeth with a ball peen hammer (all but his front two) to get the tubes out, by which time he claims he’d been dead for an hour and a half.

The only thing more intoxicating for Van Zandt than drugs and alcohol was the allure of songwriting and the songwriter’s life (though the two are hardly mutually exclusive). “There was one point I realized, man, I could really do this,” he recalls, “but it takes blowing everything off. It takes blowing your family off, money, security, happiness, freedoms. Get a guitar and go.” And so he went, abandoning his young wife and child (the first in a succession he would desert) for a squalid life on the road. It offered, in Mr. Kristofferson’s apt description, “the liberation of a free fall.”

Van Zandt never looked back. He continued to tour, drink, and write (then drink some more) for the rest of his life. “Sometimes I don’t know where this dirty road is taking me / sometimes I don’t even know the reason why, ” he sings by way of explanation, “but I guess I keep a’gamblin’, lots of booze and lots of ramblin’ / well it’s easier than just waitin’ around to die.”

– Martin Edlund

FIRST DESCENT
PG-13, 110 minutes

“First Descent” follows five of the world’s premier snowboarders, ranging in age from 18 to 40, as they encounter the astonishingly steep and avalanche-prone mountains of Alaska. The movie also goes into some of the history of snowboarding, from its riotous origins as a youth sub-culture to the massive popularity it currently enjoys, albeit uneasily.

When the snowboarders are in their element, whether on Alaskan mountains or in freestyle competition, there is a breathless excitement to the participants, a controlled recklessness. This excitement seems to exist despite the best efforts of the director. Slow-motion shots are used to the point of absurdity, and nearly every bit of action is accompanied by an irritating brand of pseudo-punk rock.

More surprising is the lack of snowboarding footage in the film. And there is far too much filler (Shawn Farmer, an impressive snowboarder, is shown rapping not once but twice in two of the most embarrassing scenes you will ever see). Much of the running time is taken up by interviews with snowboard legends, snowboard manufacturers, snowboard filmmakers, etc., and their comments, with a few exceptions, range from the inane to the idiotic. For a sport that emphasizes youth and rebelliousness, the historical aspects of the film are about as rote and dull as a high school civics lesson. The one brilliant exception to this is brief footage from old snowboarding videos of apres-ski antics that prefigure “Jackass” by about 20 years.

– Kevin Lam

FAR SIDE OF THE MOON
unrated, 105 minutes

Robert Lepage’s “Far Side of the Moon” starts with deep contemplation of, well, the far side of the moon. Then the image of the moon’s scarred backside dissolves into the round window of a laundromat washing machine that, in turn, transforms into the hatch of the Apollo 12 landing module sitting abandoned on the surface of the moon as a Chinese-inflected score plays over the credits, which are written in a faux-Cyrillic font. The entire movie shifts and mutates like this, composing a constantly changing, borderless world that turns its inhabitants into insubstantial phantoms. And it’s a testament to the light touch of Robert Lepage that the movie feels more like a trip to a brainy amusement park than a slog through a graduate thesis.

Philippe (Mr. Lepage) is a perpetual grad student, peering out on the world that continually rejects his doctorate thesis on the narcissism of the space program. He lives with his mother while waiting for his genius to be discovered. His estranged brother Andre (Mr. Lepage), is, as Philippe puts it, “like most gays I know: carefree, rich, and lucky.” When mom dies (or maybe she kills herself, there’s much debate about it), Philippe feels that it’s time to reconcile with his brother, but first he has to reconcile himself to rejection by the Russian space program.

Mr. Lepage is Canada’s foremost theater director, and his visual imagination never fails: “Far Side of the Moon” is richer and more inventive than any other small movie you’ll see this year. But the final image of an emotional astronaut, stranded in space and slowly drifting away, may be too dark and uncompromising for some audiences.

– Grady Hendrix

LITTLE MAN
unrated, 107 minutes

Exploiting a suffering child on film is ethically questionable, but filmmaker Nicole Conn has made an ultimately captivating (though initially unsettling) documentary with “little man,” a chronicle of the premature birth and troubled life of her son Nicholas.

Ms. Conn (“Claire of the Moon”) and her partner Gwen Baba share a child that Ms. Baba carried, but chose to employ a surrogate for their second. The surrogate, however, misled the couple with regard to her health (she was missing a kidney and suffered from preeclampsia in previous pregnancies) and underwent a troubled pregnancy. When doctors confirmed that the fetus was developing slowly, they recommended an abortion, which Ms. Baba agreed to. Ms. Conn, however, did not.

The child, Nicholas, was ultimately c-sectioned 100 days premature. He weighed 1 pound, had a heart the size of a walnut, and could not breathe on his own. His statistical chance of survival, we are told, was less than 0.000004%.

This film documents the heart-wrenching struggle, taken mostly by Ms. Conn, to keep Nicholas alive. There is never solace to be found, as even when Nicholas is allowed out of the hospital, doctors find that he is developing both physical and mental problems that will plague him – assuming he even lives to see his first birthday. The struggle is monumental, laden with misery and self-doubt, and both partners admit that the choice to keep Nicholas alive can lead to the eventual end of their relationship.

– Edward Goldberger