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Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind, review: Ethan Coen’s document of an irascible genius

Jerry Lee Lewis
Jerry Lee Lewis

If Jerry Lee Lewis didn’t already exist, the Coen brothers would have had to invent him. The 86-year-old Louisianan singer and pianist has led a life more tangled than Fargo’s blackmail plot. There were his seven marriages, the third to his 13-year-old cousin; the abortive attempt to play Jesus Christ in a Hollywood film; even a 1976 arrest outside the gates of Graceland on the grounds that he was allegedly planning to shoot Elvis Presley.

The music itself was just as haphazard – not just in its flamboyant, piano-stool-kicking execution, but also in terms of genre and popularity which zig-zagged wildly since epochal rock and roll numbers like Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On and Great Balls of Fire in the late 1950s. Even the hair had a Coen-esque quality – at the beginning of a performance it would be as neatly coiffed as George Clooney’s in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, but after a minute or so of that driving boogie-woogie bass line, the look was closer to Nicolas Cage in Raising Arizona.

Perhaps all of the above makes the man known as the Killer a natural subject for this first solo feature from Ethan Coen, which premiered at Cannes last night. It’s a witty and affectionate if rather slight archive documentary, comprised almost entirely of concert footage – the most recent from January 2020 – and clips of Lewis giving interviews on television, harvested from throughout his career.

It couldn’t be less like Coen’s older brother Joel’s own solo debut: last year’s jagged and glowering adaptation of Macbeth for AppleTV+. That film felt like the work of a great director stepping pointedly out of his comfort zone. This one, by contrast, has the feel of a dad’s secret project, as if Coen had spent his Sunday afternoons drilling and hammering it together in the garden shed. (It was co-edited by his wife Tricia Cooke, who served as editor or assistant editor on seven Coen brothers films.)

Trouble in Mind is flatly celebratory in tone, and cheers on Lewis’s driving music and irascible personality at every turn. Of course it could hardly avoid addressing the matter of his marriage to his cousin, but since the entire film has been pieced together from archive footage it can’t help but feel hilariously out of step with today’s pro forma cancel culture expressions of regret.

“Well, she was 12 years old,” he flatly tells a TV interviewer (the goading error presumably being intentional). “Thirteen the next day. Then she was 14.”

A little later, it’s the subject of levity: “I had so many cousins I had to marry one of them,” he deadpans on a talk show, proudly uncowed.

Lewis’s tangled family tree and ever-changing marital status allows Coen occasional opportunities to lace the material with dry humour. The singer and televangelist Jimmy Swaggart is introduced, quite accurately, as Lewis’s “first cousin and second cousin”, while “ex-wife and cousin” of course accompanies footage of a TV conversation with spouse number three Myra Gale Brown, who describes an incident in which Lewis shot his bassist.

“The bass player eventually came back to him, didn’t he?” the presenter says through a forced smile. “Oh no. No he did not,” Brown replies.

But for the most part, the film’s style feels wilfully anonymous. Rather than doing the standard chronological run-through, it dips in and out of areas of interest, but never probes too deeply – while Lewis’s constant bragging in interviews eventually becomes tedious. Perhaps that lack of editorialising is a signature Coen touch after all: we’re shown the man’s genius and flaws at screwball speed, and left to draw our own conclusions.