Year of the Horse: Neil Young and Crazy Horse Live
Jim Jarmusch's low-tech tribute to the 30-year-old collaboration between  grunge godfather Neil Young and his favorite garage band, Crazy Horse, is both a  quirky little movie and a monument to one of rock & roll's greatest noisemakers.  Partially culled from some gritty archival material shot in 1976 and 1986, and  supplemented by lots of super-8 footage of Young and Crazy Horse between shows  while on a concert tour (the concert footage itself appears to be shot on 16mm),Year of the Horseis very much like one of the band's paradoxical  performances: epic but transitory, ragged but direct, focused but  improvisational. Jarmusch understands Crazy Horse and its quixotic musical quest  too well to embalm them in a conventional profile-and-performance  "rockumentary." Instead, he honors the off-and-on marriage of Young and the  others by treating the various chapters of their lives together as shadows in  time, fleeting glimpses of a brotherhood that has no secrets.Jarmusch devotes some time to the ghosts in this film--Danny Whitten, Crazy  Horse's original guitarist, and the band's late manager--then disperses them  with eerie, soundless footage of black-and-white shapes that flutter off into  their own void. It's the same poetic dance of light and shadow that caught  Jarmusch's fancy inStranger Than ParadiseandDead Man, but   here--as with Neil Young and Crazy Horse at their musical best--it is pure in  its essence, nonliteral, pouring in from some fount of raw discovery and  inspiration. Exciting stuff, as are performances of band workhorses such as  "Sedan Delivery" and the gorgeous "Like a Hurricane."--Tom Keogh