Gone Girl, Part 2

 

KAREN DALTON: IN MY OWN TIME (2020) (B) - A couple of Art Department veterans team up behind the camera for the first time to explore the sad tale of Karen Dalton a blues and folk singer who never broke big in the '60s or '70s and sabotaged her own career by abusing drugs and alcohol. 

Dalton was part of the burgeoning folk scene in New York's Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, along with Bob Dylan and the gang. But her sound was much more bluesy -- with even a tinge of gospel -- than the Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore" crowd offered. She sounded a lot like Billie Holiday (though she apparently did not like that comparison), with a raspy voice dripping with melancholy.

Dalton made some poor life choices. She got married and had a child as a teen and chose her relationships poorly; one of them led to a knocked-out front tooth, which certainly didn't help her come off as photogenic. She recorded albums in 1969 and 1971, and Woodstock's Michael Lang tried to break her out with another album, but Dalton didn't finish it. She instead eventually ended up in upstate New York near Woodstock, where she lived out her years quietly, eventually dying of AIDS.

Apparently a lousy mother, Dalton struggled to have healthy relationships with the children she had young. Her daughter Abbe is the main talking head here, providing an important perspective. Nick Cave shows up to convey the dramatic impact that Dalton's music had on him. Writer-directors Richard Peete and Robert Yapkowitz march through the story chronologically, and they pause the proceedings whenever one of Dalton's recordings is featured, giving each one a title card and a respectful playing time. It is not until the end that they finally reveal one of Dalton's own original compositions, an effective technique after filling the movie with examples of Dalton's diary entries, which early on are compelling but gradually grow less coherent in later years. 

It would be nice if Dalton wasn't such a pathetic figure. It's hard to maintain interest in a junkie as a main subject. This is a woeful tale, but Dalton's troubled soul can generate empathy at times. And the music is haunting.

BONUS TRACKS

A beautiful song, written by Dalton's third husband, Richard Tucker, about leaving New York and heading back to a life of poverty in Colorado, "Are You Leaving for the Country?":

 

Here is Tim Hardin's "Reason to Believe," which Dalton was one of the first to record:

 

Nick Cave singles this song out as altering his musical universe, "Something on Your Mind":

Perhaps a fitting epitaph, "A Little Bit of Rain," written by frequent collaborator Fred Neil: