George Burns may have said it best when he said "At my age, I get a standing ovation just for standing."
And if you're a YouTube troller, you may be aware of Young @ Heart, the Northampton, Mass. choir of seventy, eighty and ninetysomethings who put their own wisened and playful spin on songs by everyone from James Brown to the Ramones to Sonic Youth.
They've toured the world -- walkers and oxygen tanks in tow -- and even inspired a clone band of geriatric rockers, The Zimmers, which was assembled by the BBC.
But seeing Young @ Heart in bits and pieces of viral phenomena can't prepare you for the experience of this movie, a funny and achingly sad behind-the-scenes look at how the choir members, some of whom are barely hanging on to life, rehearse new material for a sold-out show called Alive And Well.
Before it's done, we'll see a flirtatious 92-year-old named Eileen Hunt turn The Clash's Should I Stay or Should I Go from a defiant demand into an innocent question, Sonic Youth's Schizophrenia turned into, well, something completely different, and the Prince/Sinead O'Connor standard Nothing Compares 2 U into the penultimate eulogy.
I say penultimate, because there is one subplot that rises above the rest, that of the oxygen-deprived Fred Knittle, who is coaxed out of "retirement" for what is to be a duet of Coldplay's Fix You. It ends up being a solo for tragic reasons. And his delivery, a sweet baritone syncopated by the click of his oxygen pump, of lyrics like "And the tears come streaming down your face/When you lose something you can't replace/When you love someone, but it goes to waste, could it be worse?" is enough to bring tears to a statue's eyes. There's a weary acceptance that morphs a mere pop song in much the same way that the dying Johnny Cash did with Nine Inch Nails' Hurt.
(In yet another tear-jerking moment a la Cash, the choir melts a crowd of inmates in a warmup prison show with their rendition of Dylan's Forever Young).
When it isn't a life-or-death docudrama, Young @ Heart is pure let's-put-on-a-show fooforah, focusing as much on the choir's obsessed fiftysomething director Bob Cilman, who is a sympathetic but demanding taskmaster, prone to crazy fits of inspiration. Chief among these is the Sonic Youth song, which elicits groans and disapproval from the choir on first hearing, but slowly and impossibly takes shape.
We watch aged African-American Dora Parker Morrow let go some deliriously joyous primal screams in I Feel Good, and enjoy some canned videos (Golden Years, I Wanna Be Sedated) sandwiched between the life stories herein.
Beyond the simple truism that you're never too old to rock (how long before Mick & Keith end up auditioning for the choir?), Young @ Heart underlines both the agony and ecstasy of age, the failure of the body and the indomitability of the spirit, tempered by the sad wisdom that is a consolation prize of outliving the rest of us.
(This film is rated PG)
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