Movies in Brief: ‘Wild Combination’
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Anyone who mythologizes the glory days of East Village bohemia will watch Matt Wolf’s “Wild Combination,” which opens Friday at IFC Center, with a frog in his throat. Sympathetic enough to count as a fan’s hagiography, this modestly mounted documentary details the life, death, and artistic evolution of Arthur Russell, one of the most remarkable figures to emerge from the downtown New York music scene of the 1970s.
An Iowa farm boy turned avant-everything cello player, Russell (1952-92) was a child of the corn whose impulsive teenage escape to San Francisco landed him in hippie Buddhist communes and on a recording session with Allen Ginsberg, who featured the musician on his 1971 “First Blues” album. Later, Russell would move into Ginsberg’s apartment building on East 12th Street and continue writing hundreds of songs, articulating his passions in a keening, emotionally nuanced voice and experimenting with percussive loops and electronic effects that transported his compositions beyond genre.
Russell, whose severe acne and burgeoning homosexuality marked him as an outsider in the Midwest, blossomed in the polymorphously perverse Manhattan of the 1970s. He befriended seemingly everyone, including David Byrne and Philip Glass, with whom he collaborated, and was the musical director of the Kitchen back when SoHo was an artist’s free zone and not an outlet mall. As Mr. Wolf recounts through interviews, sound recordings, and grainy archival video footage, Russell was not only prodigal but prolific. He embraced the nascent disco movement, creating revolutionary dance tracks, and may have been the first East Villager to sport a trucker cap because, well, he was from Iowa.
Those rural roots are emphasized in poignant conversations with Russell’s elderly parents, for whom his homosexuality came as a shock. But they accepted their son’s death at age 40 from AIDS with surprising grace, welcoming Russell’s lover into their lives.
If “Wild Combination” never really manages to give us a complete portrait of Russell, it will whet appetites for his music, which is remains as unique, and as contemporary, as ever.
