CSNY Déjà Vu

US troops are overseas fighting a controversial war and hippie favourites Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young are on stage singing protest songs. It could be Woodstock, 1969. Except it isn’t; it’s 2006, and as if to demonstrate the cruelty of the intervening years, a white-haired Stephen Stills, has just accidentally stumbled off the front of the stage, mid-guitar solo, like your drunken, geriatric granddad after a hip operation.

Neil Young’s latest documentary, CSNY Déjà Vu, follows the reformed CSNY (average age: 62) as they tour Young’s protest album, Living With War, across America. We soon discover that Stephen Stills’ sense of balance isn’t the only thing that’s deteriorated over the years. In the wake of 9/11, speaking up against the war or the President has become a blood sport for American entertainers, something The Dixie Chicks recorded in their similar documentary, Dixie Chicks: Shut up and Sing. Young’s decision to unleash his new song ‘Let’s Impeach The President’ on an unsuspecting redneck audience in Atlanta, Georgia, is therefore impressively brave. Or stupid. Either way, watching a sea of mullets simultaneously quiver with patriotic rage is one of the film’s chief spectacles.

It’s heart, however, comes from the involvement of war reporter Mike Cerre, whose experiences in Vietnam provide the been-there, done-that credibility that your long-haired musician types lack. It’s thanks to Cerre that, however pure his filmmaking motivations might be, Young manages to avoid a sense of Bono-like self-canonisation. Cerre’s interviews with the victims of war are interspersed with performance and archive footage, and it’s these voices – an AWOL soldier in hiding in Canada, a mother whose son was killed by friendly fire and an Iraq veteran running for Congress – that transform CSNY Déjà Vu from your average ego-driven rockumentary into something both moving and intelligent.

Ellen E Jones

Anticipation:

Past-it rockers on tour? Can’t say we’re that enthused.

Enjoyment:

It might not have anything new to say, but what it does say, it says well.

In Retrospect:

This rockumentary hybrid is a welcome addition to the anti-war doc canon. If you like the music, even better.