SXSW starts to swing

The festival premieres films about Al Franken, the Pixies and the music biz. Plus: Did Andy Dick really hump an audience member's head?

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Movies, Arts & Entertainment, Al Franken, South by Southwest

Al Franken in "Al Franken: God Spoke."

March 14, 2006 | AUSTIN, Texas -- You know you're at the South by Southwest festival when the guy in front of you in the popcorn line at the movies, the shambling dude with the giant Afro comb stuck in his giant Afro, actually is ?uestlove of the Roots, rather than just some hipster who looks like him. And when the woman with equally impressive hair who is standing in the auditorium doorway telling him to hurry up and get his ass inside is Erykah Badu. (Admittedly, I've never seen anybody who looked much like her.)

On Day Three of this year's SXSW Film Festival, some of the event's vaunted convergence came to the fore, with rousing world premieres of two new music documentaries: the anti-corporate screed "Before the Music Dies," in which Badu and ?uestlove are prominently featured, and "loudQUIETloud," which follows '80s indie-rock legends the Pixies through their 2004 reunion tour. Beyond that, SXSW's friendly, slightly scruffy alterna-vibe began to seem more coherent. In its own unthreatening, vintage-clothes-'n'-cappuccino manner, this festival is launching one protest after another against the way America is right now and how it's being run.

Nothing distills this tendency more succinctly than "Al Franken: God Spoke," the painful and hilarious new documentary from cinéma-vérité veterans Nick Doob and Chris Hegedus that premiered on Saturday night. It's hilarious because Franken, of course, remains a killer comedian even as we watch him engage the so-called major issues of the 2004 campaign season, do his Saddam Hussein routine for American troops in Iraq, or wrassle such media dragons as Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity. It's painful because, as in all tragedies, we know what's going to happen at the end of that campaign, and Franken and the rest of the cast don't.

Hegedus, the longtime colleague (and wife) of documentary legend D.A. Pennebaker -- her directing credits include "Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock," "The War Room" and "Startup.com" -- tells me during an interview here that it's still tough for her to watch the Election Day footage in "Al Franken." Confident of an impending regime change in Washington, and buoyed by those infamous exit polls, Franken gathers his youthful writing staff around him at a Boston hotel. "How do we make gloating funny?" he asks them, before launching into a series of mean-spirited anti-Bush riffs he hopes to use on his Air America program after President-elect Kerry is anointed the next morning.

Pride goeth before the fall and all that. Or, as Doob puts it, "Then the karma police came and got him." Liberals are known for their masochism, and this film, funny as it is, forces you to revisit those dark, dark days two Novembers ago when we had to face the fact that a majority of Americans were still not sufficiently disgusted with George W. Bush. Doob and Hegedus hope, of course, that the masochism has a point -- but whether the kind of audiences likely to be interested in a Franken film are willing to go there is an open question. (At this writing, "Al Franken: God Spoke" has no distribution deal.)

One thing the Election Day scenes clearly establish is that Doob and Hegedus haven't made a Franken infomercial, but rather a portrait of a complicated and enigmatic guy who is making a rapid and sometimes awkward transition from entertainer to political commentator and finally to potential candidate. Franken allowed the filmmakers to follow him around whenever they could, but he had no control over any aspect of their work, and the movie is in no way a collaboration. He seems both profoundly committed to his cause and at the same time a pool-hall hustler working all the angles: He chats affectionately with Karen Hughes, and performs his Henry Kissinger impersonation for an appreciative Henry Kissinger. (That's good, but not as funny as Franken's killer Dick Cheney impression, which may be the only reason to regret the vice president's eagerly awaited retirement from public life.)

Next page: "The only New York Jew in the race"