Review: I Saw the Light (2016): Ol’ Hank Done It This Way

When I first heard that a biopic was being made about Hank Williams, AND that a British actor had been cast as this most American of American artists … I felt skeptical, trepidatious, and also a little bit angry. They couldn’t find an American actor to portray an American icon? You look at Hank Williams and you see a country boy, for sure, a boy raised in the heat and the dirt, a boy who knew hunger, who lived hard and came up hard. If an actor had made a big display of that (“look at how skinny I am”, for example), it would have been condescending towards the ultra-real culture of those early days of what was known (patronizingly) as “hillbilly” music.

A lot of the artists who became stars grew up the sons of sharecroppers. To call that upbringing “humble” doesn’t cut it. It was brutal. (The same was true a decade later with Sam Phillips and the Sun roster. Carl Perkins, Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, these were Pentecostal hard-bitten country boys. That atmosphere is partially responsible for what happened, the explosion in opposition to poverty and dead-end streets. You could even see it as a little bit of healthy class warfare. Nobody wants to hear from us. Well, screw THAT. And the same thing with rhythm and blues, Robert Johnson and all the rest of them. A silent population that decided to become very very loud as an Eff You, I get something to SAY.)

Marc Abraham directed, and it’s a respectful portrayal of the well-known events of Hank Williams’ 29 years on the planet. One of the strengths of the film is the moody and emotional cinematography of Dante Spinotti, especially – especially – in what was, for me, one of the strongest moments of the film, the abstract and mythical opening credits sequence, with Hank in a spotlight, photographed in 360-degree circles, the light pouring onto him in thick almost-liquid shafts. Hank Williams’ short career WAS epic. It all happened so long ago. Does a general public know what Hank Williams even meant? I don’t mean that with disrespect. Everyone knows who he is, and his son is well-known, too, but how did his career change things? Who was he in the context of his own time? It’s like explaining the career of Sister Rosetta Tharpe to someone who doesn’t know she existed, who doesn’t know how radical she really was, who think the Beatles invented rock ‘n’ roll. Sister Rosetta showed the way for so many. But many contemporary audience members need to be schooled about this, and a good biopic can help do that. Contextualizing the music is important, and is true with the moving of Hank Williams into the mainstream, something that had never happened before for “hillbilly” artists.

The beauty of that opening sequence – with no dialogue – just an image of Hank (and you can barely see an audience there, the rest of the screen is in darkness) is that it is an emotional introduction to the importance of Hank Williams. It says, in no uncertain terms, This Man is an Icon, and He Still LOOMS over Country Music, sometimes as an inspiration, sometimes as a cautionary tale, and sometimes as a ghostly condemnation of how far country music had fallen, how much it had divorced itself from its roots.

Waylon Jennings’ 1975 song “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way” cut through the crap like a lightning-bolt. I love how he starts this live performance with a drawl, “This is a song I wrote in 10 minutes.” Bad-ASS.

I thought about that song as I watched I Saw the Light, I thought about its tribute, its anger, its humor, classic Waylon humor, practically an eye-roll at what was going on in Nashville around him.

There are a lot of opportunities missed in I Saw the Light, the main one being there is really no investigation into what exactly it was Hank Williams was doing that was so different from everybody else at that time. For people who “don’t like” country music, who think it all sounds the same, or think it’s boring or self-righteous or too Christian or whatever other opinion they have about it – first of all, your opinion is uninformed. Country music was always the place where grown-up subjects like infidelity and alcoholism and murder and hunger were addressed. Pop music left all of that out. Anyway, there is a lot of nuance and complexity in that “hillbilly” history, and it (along with rhythm and blues plus gospel). We have no respect for our cultural history and so those connections are lost in the mists of time. It’s important to recall them, to help establish that continuum.

There’s a scene early on in I Saw the Light where Hank Williams is playing in a small bar. He’s playing mostly to the women, because they’re so into him, and they fed his performance style. A man seems to have a problem with this, and starts heckling Hank, and the scene ends in a brawl with the guy charging the stage and attacking Hank, slamming him onto the floor, hurting Hank’s already aching back.

The scene is messily presented. You’re not sure what the guy’s problem is. You can’t really hear what he’s saying. You just know that Hank is pissing him off. The film needs a more complex approach, a couple of scenes indicating WHY Hank de-stabilized a well-known formula, rocking the boat musically, leaving his competitors in the dust. Williams represented the future. Those types of people are not always embraced, there can be a lot of resistance, especially in country music, the “establishment” of which is nearly as conservative as opera. Waylon Jennings felt that conservatism, had participated in it, before busting out with his BFF Willie Nelson, and they were labeled “outlaws” and it took over for a while with its Fuck these good-boy Christian types running the show. We ain’t that, we never been that. And then, when the “outlaw” thing started to feel like schtick to Waylon, he wrote a song about it, declaring his independence from it, the whole thing was made up anyway. He was an artist. He would not be defined by the labels placed on him by The Nashville Man or the New York Men.

I get why people don’t like mainstream country music now, and I don’t like it myself, with all those millionaires singing about their dusty pick-up trucks with chips on their shoulders about the rest of us and then there’s a whole alternate universe where other more interesting stuff is going on. Eric Church (whom I’ve written about) is bringing a darkness and a tough-ness to mainstream country music again. He’s one of the industry’s biggest stars, so that’s hopeful. (Church’s 8-minute long epic song about Nashville references Hank Williams. Williams still looms over that rigid formal landscape.)

But WHY did Hank Williams take over the Louisiana Hayride, with screaming girls lining up outside in the rain to buy tickets to see him and him alone, 10 years before Elvis’ success there essentially shut the whole thing down because everybody came there only to see Elvis? Elvis obliterated the Louisiana Hayride. Hank Williams, rejected from the Opry initially, had a contract on the Hayride radio show, and made his name there. Became a star. The Opry then scooped him up. But the Hayride was where it started. I Saw the Light is so focused on the Opry (as Hank was, too, granted) that the Louisiana Hayride is treated as practically a footnote. You never see any of the shows there. Williams references it once to the head of programming at the Opry, as an aggressive statement of how the Opry needed to hire him. Williams says something like, “I sing ‘Lovesick Blues’ at the Hayride, then go backstage, throw my hat onstage, and my HAT gets an encore.” I would have loved to see that. I also would have loved to see presentations of what other country music was like at that time, to make the distinction that Hank Williams was DIFFERENT and show WHY he was different.

I Saw the Light does not show us why. Most biopics forget why we’re all here, and that is the importance of the person’s art. They get sidetracked by addiction/drug abuse/prison stays/wimmen-problems, as though those are the most important and interesting elements of an artist’s life.

The closest the film gets to showing the “why” of it is in that wordless opening. There he is. Epic. Iconic. Mythic. Don’t forget, music biopic directors, in all of your patronizing reveling in drug addiction and domestic abuse and falls-from-grace: the only reason anyone still talks about any of these people is their ART. Contextualizing that art is difficult, yes, but it must be done. It must be done.

My pal Glenn Kenny’s review of I Saw the Light on Rogerebert.com is great and I was very glad he was assigned it. The man knows music. (And he referenced Waylon’s song. Such an important moment showing the length of Williams’ shadow, 30 years after Williams’ early death). He expresses (in a much more concise fashion) some of the things I’ve been saying here.

Tom Hiddleston, “I Saw the Light”