Doc Watch: No Myth

HEAVEN ADORES YOU (C+) - This is a way too inside-baseball biography of a way too depressing alt-music enigma -- the late sensitive singer-songwriter Elliott Smith -- who never comes to life over the course of a sludgy, uninspiring 105 minutes.

The first third of the film explores Smith's roots in the Portland, Ore., indie scene, when his music tended toward hard-edged grunge. But the collection of talking heads assembled here is incredibly bland, offering monotonous recollections of the '90s heyday. Either they are pulling their punches, or it just wasn't that riveting of a scene. It's harsh to say, but the people in Smith's life are not compelling storytellers. You apparently had to be there.

There are very few actual interviews of Smith used -- either because they don't exist or because the footage wasn't available. Most of the clips we get of Smith are audio recordings from an extended session on KCRW in Santa Monica (cue cliched shot of radio soundboard). For visual flair, the filmmakers linger on countless images from current-day Portland, and later in the film New York, where Smith fled around the time he hit it big with "Miss Misery," the celebrated song from his soundtrack contributions to Gus Van Sant's "Good Will Hunting." The parade of establishing shots or still lifes created by the camera -- often repeated -- come off as faux-artistic filler by -- no surprise -- a cinematographer making his directorial debut, Nickolas Dylan Rossi.

Smith's songs are mishandled -- they are treated more as background music, and they tend to bleed together as mopey drones, barely distinguishable from Nick Drake nuggets. Face it, the guy was a drag, and so is this movie. There is no dramatic insight into the heart or psyche of a tortured artist -- no sweeping revelations like the Kurt Cobain documentary "Montage of Heck."

In the end, Smith was a scruffy, depressed guy who plunged into the abyss of substance abuse. It's not until the final 20 minutes that the story turns ominous, leading up to his horrible (apparent) suicide in 2003 from a knife plunged into his heart. He was 34. A late clip of a haggard Smith shows him in a studio the piano canting over and over, "Everything means nothing to me," channeling John Lennon at his most fragile. It's a special moment in a film starved of illumination.

NUTS! (C) - This is a deeply disappointing miscue. Despite the rich material -- a between-the-wars-era eccentric who implanted goat testicles in impotent men and also ran the most powerful radio station ever, just south of the Texas border -- this profile instead flails around with crude animations and bizarre re-creations from a long-gone era.

Filmmaker Penny Lane (apparently her real name) debuted in 2013 with "Our Nixon," a curation of home footage of our disgraced president. Here, she is over-indulged as she tells the fascinating story of Dr. John Romulus Brinkley, a shady character and snake-oil salesman (he earned his MD from a diploma mill) who hatched more schemes than Ralph Kramden could even dream of. Based in the sleepy town of Milford, Kansas, Brinkley convinced men from all over that his technique of implanting sheep testicles into their nutsacks would cure them of a variety of ills. He later ran for governor, and he was a popular radio figure, rambling on at a local Kansas station for hours and hawking his goods.

But Brinkley's most pioneering move may have been creating XER-AM, a million-watt mega-blaster across the bridge from Del Rio, Texas. It was his way of evading the FCC, which had hounded him off the air. The station -- with a signal that covered two-thirds of the continental U.S. and bled into Canada -- is legendary in the annals of country music. It nurtured the careers of the Carter Family (see the fine doc "The Winding Stream"), as well as Jimmie Rodgers, Gene Autry and Red Foley.

All of that is fascinating, but Lane's film is a mess. The animations are clever but ultimately hokey and distracting. Voice actors re-create scenes and conversations cribbed from author Clement Wood's hagiography from 1934, "The Life of a Man." When we do hear old clips from Brinkley's old radio show, we have to wonder -- are those authentic recordings or re-dos? It takes the viewer out of the story.

The film itself comes off as a bit of a scam. What's real and what is not? Is Lane doing that intentionally? Whether it is or not, it's certainly disconcerting and often annoying. Sarah Polley legitimized that art form -- blurring fact with fiction -- in "Stories We Tell" in 2013. We didn't care for the technique then, and we're still annoyed by it. Nuts to that.

BONUS TRACKS
"Nuts!" could have used this on the soundtrack -- the Blasters with "Border Radio":



Elliott Smith, with his masterpiece:



The haunting "Waltz No. 1":



The band Earlimart (kindred spirits) with the title track: