J Paul Johnson
The 1987 cult road film Candy Mountain is back in theaters this month, digitally restored in 2K to celebrate the centenary of its co-director Robert Frank’s birth. It’s a film that made little impact, except among a few friendly reviewers and cineastes, upon its original release but has always had its followings. Candy Mountain boasts a supporting cast of music legends—Tom Waits, Leon Redbone, Joe Strummer, and Dr. John—in its tale of a down-and-out guitarist seeking a new lease on life, one he thinks will come when he locates a long-lost luthier who might turn his struggling career around.
Guitarist Julius (Kevin J. O’Connor) has a gig playing in a band led by Keith Burns (former New York Dolls frontman David Johansen, aka Buster Poindexter), but it’s not going well: he’s struggling with his rhythm and his sound. Burns has a light-bulb notion: if only they could track down the long-missing Elmore Silk, whose rare hand-made guitars had a special sound and incredible quality. It so happens Julius knows him, of only a little, and the two hatch a scheme. With bank from Burns, Julius will hit the road and persuade Ellis to part with whatever inventory he still has.
From then on, Candy Mountain is a road film. With a couple thousand advance in hand, Julius has his eyes on making ten or more times that if he can locate Ellis and seal the deal. On the way, he loses his girlfriend, his car, and most of his money as he tracks down Ellis through various family members (including Waits and Laurie Metcalf) finding himself along the way nearly broke and even at one point imprisoned by an especially weird father-son team played by Roberts Blossom and a guitar-plucking Leon Redbone. One can see why the luthier set out for parts unknown with friends and relatives like those Julius encounters, but Frank and co-director Rudy Wurlitzer treat these down-and-outers with empathy.
When Julius finally does locate the Salingeresque Ellis (Harris Yulin), the two lock horns: Ellis has little interest in Julius’s scheme, and Julius can’t quite fathom why a man of Ellis’s talent should keep it hidden from society. And the two eventually forge an understanding, making Julius’s arc in particular one of growth: at each stage of his journey, it turns out, his encounters have taught him something about himself.
Candy Mountain isn’t loud or ostentatious, and despite its rock-music setting and trappings, it’s as quiet a film as can be, more a delicate pluck than a power-chord riff. The leads, O’Connor and Yulin, are more character actors than they are stars, and as Julius in particular, O’Connor seems a little slight for the role. He looks the part with his pomped-up hair, sharp sideburns, and perpetual pout, but the actor is better in the small roles he’s more commonly cast in, like the dreamy poet in Peggy Sue Got Married. In general, there’s surprisingly little music for a film full of rock stars, save for a little of Keith Burns’ band rehearsal in the first act and Redbone’s idiosyncratic plucking in the second.
What Candy Mountain is, more than anything, is a young man’s journey of self-discovery. O’Connor’s Julius starts the film as a broke, modestly skilled, and directionless guitar player. At the end of the film he is an equally broke, modestly skilled, and directionless guitar player, but he has a modicum of self-awareness he hadn’t before, and he’s learned that no get-rich-quick scheme is going to leave him artistically fulfilled. He’s a young man with a world of time to figure that out.
Robert Frank (1924-2019) came to filmmaking from photography, his first documentary films chronicling the poetry of the Beats. (HIs best-known film is probably the scandalous and little-seen Rolling Stones documentary Cocksucker Blues, depicting the band members’ drug use and group sex.) As a photographer, Frank’s candid, poignant images of American life in his photobook The Americans are said to have changed the course of photography, and in celebration of his career, the first-ever solo exhibition of his work is on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Frank’s Candy Mountain, the third of his collaborations with co-director and screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer, is as quirky and charming as its collective of rock icons. Redbone, John, Waits, Johansen and the like are not the arena-filling headliners known for bombast and pyrotechnics; like the film they cameo in, they’re known for their own engaging, idiosyncratic, and wholly charming styles. In Candy Mountain, they fit right it, and it’s nice to see this nearly-lost cult classic get a little love in the 2020s with a lovely new digital remaster and theatrical re-release.
