Review: Young@Heart (2008) ****

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. – Dylan Thomas

It opens with an enraptured crowd captured in slow motion. The colored lights, the sound of cheering and the sense of anticipation are familiar. It’s a scene that has played out in clubs and theaters and stadiums millions of times since the blues first merged with American country music to form rock and roll. Something is different however as the band launches into the familiar opening riff of The Clash’s Should I Stay or Should I Go. This time the woman behind the microphone is 92 years old. Her name is Elaine Hall and she is a member of the Young@Heart Chorus.

“Darling, you’ve got to let me know,” she sings clearly and confidently. “Should I stay or should I go?” The crowd goes crazy. They want her to stay and, as you watch Stephen Walker’s new documentary about this group of singing senior citizens, you will too.

Formed in 1982, the Young@Heart chorus began by singing vaudeville tunes, but in 1984, when their rendition of Manfred Mann’s Do Wah Diddy Diddy turned out to be a huge success, their repertoire began to expand. Today they cover songs from an unlikely assortment of artists including The Ramones, Sonic Youth, Talking Heads and David Bowie.

As the documentary follows them for seven weeks, demanding chorus leader Bob Cilman attempts to incorporate two new songs into the mix: James Brown’s I Got You (I Feel Good) and Sonic Youth’s Schizophrenia. In addition, he’s worked out a one-time duet of Coldplay’s Fix You between Bob Salvini and deep voiced Fred Knittle, two long time members who’d retired because of serious health concerns. What began then as a lark, with the group struggling to simply remember the lyrics of the new songs, has now become something of a race against time itself.

You wouldn’t be wrong for taking Young@Heart as a kind of amusing novelty act, but you’d only be getting part of the story and you’d be missing all of the point. As you get to know the performers over the course of the film, the abundant humor is tinged with a mixture of poignancy and inspiration. You begin to understand that it isn’t so much about the music or even the performances, but about the capacity of the human spirit to prevail even as the human body weakens and gives out.

This is a group of people who’ve endured their share of the slings and arrows of life and they could be forgiven for sitting quietly on the sidelines marking time, but marking time is a capitulation. It’s a form of living death and the members of Young@Heart will have none of it.

What’s more, beyond simply refusing to quit, life sometimes means being taken outside of your comfort zone. Life means being challenged and, though such challenges get harder and harder as we age, the chorus members actively seek them out. They pre-date rock and roll and a song like Schizophrenia is an alien object to them. Nevertheless, they embrace it with humor and with gusto, doing their best to understand the song and make it their own. Watching them bond with each other and their songs is a genuine inspiration.

It sounds corny and the surface absurdity of senior citizens performing punk rock is undeniable, but what is punk if not a form of defiance against the status quo and what are these men and women doing if not rebelling against what is expected of them? At a certain point, living itself becomes a form of protest. However fragile, it’s a temporary defeat of the end that awaits us all and Young@Heart is a moving reminder that it’s never too late, or too early, to begin raging against the dying of the light.

Young@Heart. USA 2007 (released 2008). Directed by Stephen Walker. Starring the Young@Heart Chorus. 2 hours and 15 minutes. MPAA Rated PG for some mild language and thematic elements. 4 stars (out of 5)

Filed under: Reviews
Tags: Stephen Walker, Young@Heart