Film Forum

U.S.  2022
Directed by Ethan Coen
Producers: Steve Bing, Mick Jagger, Victoria Pearman, Peter Afterman, T Bone Burnett
Executive producers: Michael Rapino, Ryan Kroft, Callie Khouri, Stuart Besser
Edited by Tricia Anne Cooke
74 min.  A24

A sneak preview of Ethan Coen’s solo directorial debut: an all-archival portrait of the legendary, controversial rock n’ roll maverick, Jerry Lee Lewis, packed with electrifying live footage.

In 1957, Jerry Lee Lewis topped the U.S. Country and R&B charts simultaneously with the self-consciously risqué rockabilly romp “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.” The track’s driving, boogie-woogie piano and sly, insinuating vocals represent a rich, blistering, and then-unprecedented synthesis. As a child growing up in Louisiana, Lewis was enraptured by the gospel and blues music he’d heard made by African-American musicians in his community, and the influence stuck. In 1958, while Lewis was touring the United Kingdom, it was reported that he’d married his thirteen-year old cousin Myra Gale Brown, and also that he’d lied to the press about her age. In the ensuing uproar, the tour was cancelled, and so was Jerry Lee, at least as an international headliner; unbowed and unapologetic, he reinvented himself as a hard-driving road warrior, playing three hundred shows a year in small clubs.

The complications of a life lived on one’s own terms are at the heart of TROUBLE IN MIND. For his first non-fiction feature, Coen and his co-editor Tricia Cooke—the filmmaker’s wife and a key collaborator on several Coen classics, including the Oscar-winning FARGO—employ a found-footage approach, eschewing talking-head documentary conventions. In the process, the film also forestalls easy judgments on a man whose lurid reputation preceded him for over half a century and will forever remain inextricable from his creative legacy. The only real voice in the movie belongs to Jerry Lee, captured in a series of vintage television interviews featuring their share of smiling denials (“I’m a good boy,” he insists with the insidious grin of someone who isn’t) as well as long stretches of exhilarating, undeniable performance footage. The critic Robert Christgau once wrote that the singer seemed to be connected to his piano by his brain stem, and Lewis’ chaotic, flawless keyboard technique—another contradiction—did as much to galvanize rock and roll as Elvis Presley’s swinging hips.
 

Reviews

“Presents its subject as an enigma and a force of nature, a rock n’ roller whose passion and demons fuelled his volcanic music… TROUBLE IN MIND plays like a rumination or a mystery, as if Lewis is a riddle that might be solved. Central to that mystery is his controversial marriage to his 13-year-old cousin Myra when he was in his 20s – a decision that angered many fans and derailed his career….The performance clips, especially during his epochal 1950s period, remain revelatory, Lewis’ combination of boogie and rock n’ roll utterly exhilarating. These early live recordings reveal what a sexy, combustible presence he was – with his penchant for kicking the stool away while banging away on the keys a symbol of this new music’s rebellion and danger. Coen wisely allows these clips to play almost in their entirety so that we get swept up in Lewis’ wiry power…by capturing Lewis’s energy and contradictions – his thirst for spiritual transcendence but his weakness for sins of the flesh – he sketches out in broad strokes why the artist nicknamed The Killer continues to transfix and confound.” 
– Tim Grierson, Screen Daily

“Ethan Coen is such a good filmmaker, and working with the ace editor Tricia Anne Cooke he combines the clips with so much taste and pizzazz, that the film delivers just what you want. It gets you high on Jerry Lee Lewis and keeps you there…Coen syncs the movie to his own pleasure centers – and ours. The result is that TROUBLE IN MIND plays like an undiluted shot of rock ‘n’ roll moonshine joy.”
– Owen Gleiberman, Variety

“Lewis is a live-wire force with more pure charisma and innate showmanship than just about anyone else in the planet…He’s an American Original, full of bluster and bravado…If he wasn’t a real person, only the Coens (at least one of them) could make him up… the hits literaly do not stop.”
– Ben Croll, IndieWire

“Coen has put together a thoroughly enjoyable documentary composed entirely of archive footage of Jerry Lee throughout the years and his interviews and performances… In the amazing 50s footage Jerry Lee looks like the most terrifying Batman villain: the Riddler, perhaps, with his unfurled ringlets of blond hair that flew back from his head as he clattered the notes with those straight, splayed fingers for Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On, kicked the stool back and crashed a dissonant heel down on the keyboard… This documentary does something very few films can: it makes you grin with pleasure.”
– Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

“I used to know a record-industry veteran who had seen every performer there was and had given at least one household name their big break. He swore Jerry Lee Lewis was the greatest of them all, having seen him countless times. Ethan Coen’s JERRY LEE LEWIS: TROUBLE IN MIND is surely what this superfan wished for every time a younger friend snickered at his claims: a video mixtape chock-full of performances showing how even a man who rarely wrote his own songs could earn a place in the rock n’ roll pantheon.”
– John DeFore, The Hollywood Reporter