“I didn’t know living my life on my own terms would mean being challenged from every angle,” Elizabeth Cook confides in a family member (Catherine Curtin) towards the end of “The Easy Kind,” having finally realized the future that people surely warned her of when she turned her back on the star-making machine in Nashville as a musician. Opting for career in which she’d have more control over the songs she wrote and what she’d wear rather than becoming part of an apparatus that could sell out arenas, Cook has no shortage of pride but is running low on funds and while country music has a long history of embracing rebels in its lyrics, the singer/songwriter knew she wouldn’t find it in the fine print of contracts, going her own way where after years of success without the support of a major label she’s run into a major fork in the road.
It’s an inspired choice to have the accomplished documentary producer and director Katy Chevigny make her (partial) narrative feature debut on the charming hybrid portrait of Cook when a mix of fantasy and reality is fitting when Cook appears on screen to have become so beholden to what could’ve been she can’t look beyond it. Having all the real tour footage and archival videos that show the road the singer/songwriter took to get to this professional impasse, “The Easy Kind” leans on fiction to envision what it will take to get out.
Stylistically, it takes a little while for “The Easy Kind” to coalesce ironically because there are no clear distinctions between the two modes of filmmaking but there remain subtle differences. After introducing Cook with all her natural charisma as she hits the trail for a few gigs, the film settles down with her back at home on the outskirts of Music City where early fictional scenes have a slight overdetermination to them, from the dialogue to the lighting where everything seems a little too precise in comparison with what’s come before. However, the film finds its groove as Cook does when the same life that’s been mined for so much music already proves to be engaging for the screen as well.
Chevigny locates a clever narrative device in Cook’s real-life radio show where she is compelled to start airing her private thoughts for public consumption as she aims to start work on a new album. Her manager Ricky (Melissa Jackson) couldn’t be more active in setting up meetings, but the industry at large seems to have tuned her out despite a dedicated if modest following, and although she’s played the Grand Ole Opry 400 times by now, a pinnacle for most musicians, the instability that comes with being primarily a local artist has made such appearances feel less special and the hustle to keep even that going can be wearying.
“The Easy Kind” is unusual for the genre when Cook neither has a problem with addiction or a desire to chase stardom, but instead is bedeviled by having no idea of what success looks like now to her. She can be sure that having a hole in the roof of her house that she’s putting off a payment of until a bigger payday comes along is a marker that she hasn’t found it yet, but it’s telling that when something good comes right to her doorstep she’s reluctant to accept it – it isn’t a coincidence that her first instinct is to recoil from the window upon seeing Clay (Zebedee Row), a handsome handyman on her property who happens to play music, out of an abundance of caution that at once has protected her from things she knows she hasn’t wanted, but also likely limited the possibilities of what could make her happy.
Other tough times in her life are alluded to – being the 11th child to parents who raised their kids in honkytonks and an affair with a married musician (Charles Esten) – yet the least obvious happening in the present becomes the most dramatic. Chevigny admirably resists wallowing when Cook herself walks through life often wearing flippant trucker hats with wry statements of defiance, turning it all into grist for the mill and both in form and function, the film comes across as being just as refreshingly resistant to fitting into preconceptions, eschewing melodrama in favor of smaller epiphanies and an endearingly laid-back attitude towards Cook’s struggles (although it can be a little too casual when, for instance, in dealing with a member of her backing band who commits suicide, there are not enough details about the person involved for the death to land in the way likely intended.) For an artist who holds herself to a higher standard, it is no small compliment to say “The Easy Kind” succeeds on its own terms.
“The Easy Kind” will screen again at the Telluride Film Festival on September 1st at 4:15 pm at Backlot.