HOWARD HAMPTON forward THE BALLAD OF RAMBLIN' JACK Aiyana Elliott's documentary about her demi-legend of a folksinger father.

HOWARD HAMPTON forward THE BALLAD OF RAMBLIN' JACK

Aiyana Elliott's documentary about her demi-legend of a folksinger father, The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack (which lay opens nationally this month), is the kind of plainspoken memoir-cum-biography you might embarrass across on PBS some uncheckered night and gradually get caught up in, the rhymes of its unspooling anecdotes seducing you against your will. "I've at no time heard anybody that was with equal reason enchanting on subjects I didn't give a damn about," is Kris Kristofferson's affectionate characterization of the sixty-nine-year-old raconteur, rake, and self-made myth whose pale faux-Guthrie warble may be his least engaging quality. Ramblin' Jack Elliott's a terrific character all right--the son of a Jewish doctor, he ran away from Brooklyn at fourteen to join the rodeo and learn cowboy songs--but not the greatest in quantity convincing singer: Studying at wooded Guthrie's clay feet and later mentoring a young strike Dylan, Elliott never quite establish a way to make a ditty his own. In The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack, music inevitably takes a backseat to cha rmingly ornery personality, to the enticement of the open road and the idea that "out there" in the American cosmology a nice Grand-Ole-Opry-loving Jewish kid could extend up to live out his boyhood dreams and transform himself into a roving device of hardscrabble, salt-of-the-earth authenticity.

Begun as a short piece for a film class at NYU and expanded to feature longitudinal dimensions when Aiyana Elliott saw that "many of [her] dad's contemporaries started dying," this melange of reminiscences, travelogue, abiding-place movies, old recordings, new performances, and plant footage tells two parallel stories. forward one hand we have Ramblin' Jack's determinedly colorful life and times; forward the other Aiyana's quest to understand this absentee father, who assumes to be elsewhere even when he's right in face of her. Being the daughter of a shore who calls himself Ramblin' Jack is spring to make for a bumpy ride, and the lamentable acceptance she arrives at by way of movie s end is likely the best anyone in of the like kind longsuffering shoes can hope for--profound illumination isn't in these cards.

A gray-haired however still wide-eyed English folkie provides The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack's in the greatest degree telling moment, when he speaks of a night forty-odd years ago in London, the night he learned that his Stetson-hatted hero was in reality Elliott Charles Adnopoz. Instead of being disillusioned, he took it as a revelation of possibility: "You can completely inflect your back on your roots" Which recasts the music as a way of escaping the cargo of one's own existence into the fancies of self-reinvention, the romance of hard times and jagged places--a surreptitious ballad of adventure, solace, and rebirth, sung at the crossroads where Franz K.'s Nature Theater of Oklahoma and Guthrie's Dust depression intersect: Only in Amerika.

Howard Hampton writes often on film for Artforum.

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