A Conversation With Rex Miller (HARLEY FLANAGAN: WIRED FOR CHAOS)

Rex Miller’s Harley Flanagan: Wired for Chaos, which premiered at last year’s DOC NYC, centers on the titular frontman of the NYC hardcore band Cro-Mags, who began his punk rock career at the unlikely (very unhealthy) age of 11, beating drums for the Stimulators (founder and guitarist Denise Mercedes is Flanagan’s aunt). Indeed, to say that Flanagan grew up too fast is a vast understatement. Not so much raised as allowed to run wild on the gritty Lower East Side of the 70s and 80s – the pioneering musician’s free-spirited “Warhol Factory “it” girl” mom believed children were better off sans parental guidance – Flanagan was surrounded by sex, drugs and rock and roll pretty much from infancy; and also by a who’s who of downtown artists, musicians and writers. (His mother’s close friends included Allen Ginsberg and Lucy Sante – who appears throughout the doc.) It’s a heck of a life, made all the more palpable by Miller’s deft use of archival footage from the era, along with more recent interviews with the bassist-vocalist’s eclectic array of notable friends and fans – everyone from Flea, to Ice-T, to Michael Imperioli and the late Anthony Bourdain. Surprisingly, Flanagan, now in his late 50s, still performs – and still practices the Brazilian Jiu-jitsu for which he earned a black belt. He’s also the happily married father of two sons – perhaps the forged-by-fire survivor’s most remarkable accomplishment of all. The week of the film’s streaming debut Hammer to Nail caught up with Miller, who’s also a veteran DP and producer, to learn all about capturing such a tumultuous life – and making sense of the chaos.

To read my interview visit Hammer to Nail.

“The Greatest Gift We Have is Community, Which is Such an Integral Part of the Human Experience”: Ebs Burnough on Kerouac’s Road: The Beat of a Nation

Kerouac’s Road: The Beat of a Nation is a smartly unconventional look at the 1957 novel that captured a counterculture and continues to resonate with outsiders and inner journey seekers to this very day. Directed by Ebs Burnough (The Capote Tapes), the peripatetic doc includes “never-before-seen material” from the personal archive of Jack Kerouac (born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac to French-Canadian immigrants in the small town of Lowell, MA) along with images that provide much-needed context to the sexy author’s postwar milieu. But rather than centering the mythologized man or his alter ego Sal Paradise, Burnough instead takes the inspired decision to focus on the much bigger picture of legacy. And beyond interviewing the requisite academics and surviving friends (David Amram) and lovers (Joyce Johnson), Burnough gives equal weight to today’s no name “on-the-roaders” that we tag along with, and a diverse slew of big name Kerouac fans that sit for the director’s lens. That includes everyone from Josh Brolin and Matt Dillon, to W. Kamau Bell and Natalie Merchant, to Jay McInerney and Kim Jones – the designer who paid tribute to On the Road with his Fall 2022 collection for Dior. (Kerouac admirer Michael Imperioli also makes an offscreen appearance as the ear-catching voice of Jack.) Interestingly, Burnough, a Black gay man who grew up in the South, has an outsider’s perspective on this quintessential outsider’s life that allows him to prompt some truly revelatory insights. In one wonderfully telling scene Johnson recalls how Kerouac encouraged not only her writing but also for her to get out and take a solo road trip of her own — an insanely clueless suggestion considering the risks to a single woman on the road. Not only might she die at the hands of a predator, she could lose her life if she needed an abortion. When Burnough asks what the consequences were for men at the time, Johnson seems startled before firmly declaring, “None.” (Stand-up comic and On the Road fan W. Kamau Bell, a Black man raised in the South but also in Massachusetts, finds the book fascinating almost as an anthropological study, pointing out that it’s an exclusive journey made possible by white male privilege.) Just prior to the doc’s August 1st theatrical premiere, Filmmaker reached out to the multi-hyphenate director, currently the CEO of Hatch House Media, a visiting scholar at Oxford, and a former Senior Advisor to Michelle Obama who served as the Deputy White House Social Secretary.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“We Put Ourselves in the Center of the Universe Without Thinking of the Other Creatures and Species Around Us”: Victor Kossakovsky on Architecton

A film starring rocks should not be this thrilling. But in the meditative hands of master documentarian Victor Kossakovsky (2018’s Aquarela, 2020’s Oscar-shortlisted Gunda), Architecton, which premiered at this year’s Berlinale, is an epic and hypnotic stone-centered quest to answer the existential question, “How do we inhabit the world of tomorrow?” And the original precursor to today’s concrete — the most-used substance in the world after water — seems to provide a surprisingly sensible answer. With Italian architect Michele De Lucchi as our bedrock, we’re swept into a visually striking, globetrotting excursion that takes us from the bombed-out buildings of Ukraine, to the earthquake-shattered cities of Turkey, and all the way back to Lebanon’s temple ruins in Baalbek, which have been around since AD 60, manmade and natural disasters be damned. Which ultimately returns us to the renowned architect, whose works have been acquired by the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and perhaps his greatest legacy-defining design of all: a landscape project based around a circle that no human will ever be allowed to enter. A green reminder that we are not the center of a universe that puts people and pebbles on equal footing. Whether we’ll remain on firm ground is up to us. Just prior to the film’s August 1st theatrical premiere, Filmmaker reached out to the Russian director, whose political views and refusal to work within a corrupt film industry caused him to leave his homeland over a decade ago. (And whose citizenship nevertheless prevented him from actually shooting in Ukraine.)

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

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“We Created the Film to Address How Journalism Was Perpetuating Anti-Trans Bias”: Sam Feder on Heightened Scrutiny

As someone who started calling myself “bigendered” decades ago, trans visibility has been both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it’s a relief to no longer have to explain being nonbinary to puzzled and often dubious cisgender folks (gay and straight alike). On the other hand, it’s infuriating to watch as one’s existence is then abruptly erased and turned into an “ideology” by right-wing transphobes. And it’s downright demeaning to have one’s identity suddenly hijacked and transformed into a hip “cause” by cisgender liberals. (The dehumanization inevitably leading to dangers like the NYTimes breathless bothsidesism reporting on trans issues by cis reporters — though no doubt the equivalent would have occurred had the BLM movement been covered exclusively by white folks.) Everyone from haters to allies are so obsessed with pronouns and bathrooms (prurient clickbait) that the crucial bigger picture of bodily autonomy gets swept aside in the larger cis discourse. Which is why it’s so refreshing and empowering to sit through Sam Feder’s Sundance-debuting Heightened Scrutiny, an up-close look at levelheaded ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio as he embarks on a high-stakes journey preparing to become the first known transgender person to make oral arguments before the most consequential platform of all: the Supreme Court of the United States. And while the recent outcome of U.S. v. Skrmetti, in which SCOTUS upheld a Tennessee state law banning puberty blockers and hormone therapy for the treatment of gender dysphoria in minors (though treatment for other medical reasons is still permitted), is disappointing, Feder is smartly less concerned with keeping score on the trans rights battlefield than with who is representing the team. Finally we, through Strangio, are the dignified adults in charge, taking the narrative back into our own hands and acting as the spokespeople for our own bodies, ourselves. (Here’s to the tattooed advocate following in ACLU board member Thurgood Marshall’s shoes.) Just prior to the doc’s July 18th opening at DCTV, Filmmaker reached out to Feder, who we last caught up with to discuss Disclosure, the director’s 2020 deep dive into how trans individuals have historically been depicted onscreen.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

‘Life After’ Review: Reid Davenport’s Powerfully Constructed Look at Right-to-Die Policy

Davenport is dead-set, so to speak, on putting the blame for a broken system where it belongs. Reid Davenport’s Life After is about bodies, specifically the inconvenient bodies that society is seemingly bent on eliminating rather than accommodating. Case in point is Elizabeth Bouvia, the quadriplegic portal through which Davenport dives deep into a topic that both liberals and libertarians love to champion: assisted dying. The documentary opens with early-’80s footage of the fiercely determined California woman navigating her electric wheelchair through a courtroom where she fights for her “right to die.” It’s a battle she would ultimately lose, and one imagines that her subsequent disappearance from public view was partially informed by her having to endure condescending questions from the likes of a “creepy Mike Wallace,” as Davenport spot-on notes at one point. What happened to the media-friendly, if reluctant, activist had been a mystery nagging at Davenport, who likewise has cerebral palsy, for a decade. Which in turn launched this very personal investigation to locate Bouvia or her family to find out if she was still alive, and, if so, if she was doing okay. Perhaps, then, Davenport could even pose to her a question that a straight, white, non-disabled 60 Minutes host would never think to ask: Would she have chosen “death with dignity” if society had offered her “life with dignity” instead?

To read the rest of my review visit Slant Magazine.

The latest episode of the Deadline and Nō Studios podcast Doc Talk is out!

And this week co-hosts John Ridley (Oscar winner for 12 Years a Slave) and Matt Carey (Deadline's Documentary Editor) talk early Oscar doc predictions with a Hollywood clueless guest: Me.

Listen here.