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AFF preview: ‘The Secret to a Happy Ending’
Billed as their own “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” or “Some Kind of Monster,” the Drive-By Truckers rockumentary, “The Secret to a Happy Ending” is a mash note from filmmaker Barr Weissman. It artfully articulates the emphatically Southern-but-not-quite-Southern-rock band’s social relevance and its fans’ passionate connection. But, unlike much of DBT’s very best material, it’s hesitant to poke around the dark corner’s of the outfit’s collective psyche.
The documentary has its regional premiere Sunday at the Austin Film Festival.
Weissman, very much a fan himself, spent a couple of years hanging around the band beginning in 2005, a period that included the divorce of guitarist-singer-songwriter Jason Isbell and bassist Shonna Tucker, Isbell’s departure (ouster?) from the band, the rocky sessions for “A Blessing and a Curse” and the band’s near-breakup.
I’m not saying Weissman should have dragged Isbell and Tucker to marriage counseling and rolled film, but for all the movie’s virtues, there are questions glaringly left unanswered. Sometimes that’s not entirely Weissman’s fault. The unlikely but enduring partnership between frontmen Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley, for example, seems to be a mystery even to them. Partners since 1985, these are two very different personalities. Reflecting on their past relationship, Hood is vague: “We had some sort of falling out or something for a while.” Well, about what?
Still, it’s an incredible story. Years of hard touring took their toll in busted marriages for more than Isbell and Tucker; they went for broke on “Southern Rock Opera,” their two-disc ode to Lynyrd Skynyrd that took six years to finish - and then no label wanted it. As Cooley’s epigram for the film says, “It ain’t too late to take a deep breath and throw yourself into it with everything you got.”
(Photo by Jay Janner 2008 AMERICAN-STATESMAN)
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