Patrick D’s review published on Letterboxd:
A nearly great music doc which, like all things in our lives, was disrupted by the pandemic. Instead of avoiding the pandemic angle, director Sam Jones features it heavily, showing how Isbell and his band released their 2020 record Reunions to empty venues while fans attended via Zoom. We watch Isbell and his family pass the time tending to their chickens, playing music on the porch, reading bedtime stories. We listen as Isbell confesses how much he’s struggling with the standstill the pandemic has brought to his life, how if it weren’t for his wife and daughter he likely would’ve relapsed and returned to heavy drinking.
The pandemic narrative is a worthwhile one, as much as it feels like a clunky deviation from the main storyline. It ties into Isbell’s struggle to balance career and family, his reliance on music as escape in the absence of substances, and the music-making process in general. The film is best when we see Isbell and his band craft a song, like one of the opening scenes where he and his wife go back and forth to figure out which preposition to use in the lyrics of the titular “Running with Our Eyes Closed.” Or when his bandmate tells him to use an acoustic guitar instead of electric to capture a “jangly” sound. Music doc-veterans might not find all this that interesting, but I enjoyed Jones’s choice to include all these technical moments of music production, as well as Isbell’s willingness to show audiences how the sausage gets made. How will non-fans enjoy the film? Hard to say, but as someone who listened to a lot of his music during the pandemic, I’m really glad this movie made it to the light.
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