Film slows down for look into Truckers' songs and darkness behind them

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."

For a band that's written and talked its source material extensively, the film still finds some gaps to fill in. We get to meet Hood's great-uncle George A., for example, the inspiration for "The Sands of Iwo Jima." And there's great stories from Hood's father, David, the Muscle Shoals bassist who hung around the studio with everybody from the Rolling Stones to Cher.

Better still, there's plenty of live footage with less-familiar arrangements and songs going back to Hood and Cooley's time in Adam's House Cat. (And a good number of photos showing band members with unfortunate '70s and '80s hair.)

There's also an abundance of out-the-car-window shots of down-on-their-luck small Southern towns. Cooley explains what he sees looking out the tour bus window and in doing makes a point of the universality of the band's thematic focus: "Cars on blocks, crystal meth in bathtubs, guys in wife-beater T-shirts who either are in jail for shooting their wife or are going to tonight - it's not the South, it's, it's America."

Hood provides the flip side of that, describing the Truckers' live shows: "No matter how dark it may be, it's still a party."

That's the duality of the Truckers thing. DBT devotees will find a lot to love in "The Secret to a Happy Ending," while neophytes might well discover a new obsession. What neither group will get, however, is the whole story.

`The Secret to a Happy Ending' screens at 8:30 p.m. Sunday at the Austin Convention Center and at 7 p.m. Oct. 28 at the Alamo Lake Creek. www.austinfilm

festival.com.