Throughout his laudably long and productive career as one of the genuine icons of the rock music era, Neil Young has also released a number of concert films as well. These have ranged from straight performance pieces (“Rust Never Sleeps,” “Neil Young: Heart of Gold”) to ones that have attempted a more extensive overview of his career (“Year of the Horse”) and have been overseen by filmmakers from Jonathan Demme, Jim Jarmusch and Hal Ashby to Young himself (billed under his cinematic nom de plume, Bernard Shakey).
There have been so many of them that, with the arrival of “Coastal,” one has to ask what another film along these lines could say or do that would make it interesting to anyone beyond the most devoted fans. Sadly, it is a question that the film does not seem inclined to answer, instead supplying viewers with 102 minutes of general monotony that even those hard-core buffs—the kind that still own vinyl copies of “Everybody’s Rockin” and “Old Ways”—may find to be a chore to sit through.
The film focuses on a short solo tour of a few California cities conducted by Young in July of 2023. Under normal circumstances, this would hardly be remarkable except for two details: These shows marked his first tour of any sort in about four years, and they would also be his first concerts since the COVID-19 pandemic. This raises a number of questions that could have made for interesting subject matter. How does it feel to step back out onto the stage after such a long absence, especially considering the circumstances behind that gap, without the presence of a band to fall back on? How have his thoughts on the entire performing process changed over the years? What governed his song choices—an eclectic mix that included everything from “On the Way Home” to classics like “Vampire Blues” to more recent tunes like “Love Earth”—and how they work for him in their newly stripped-down arrangements? Most significantly, what compels him to challenge audience expectations at an age when most of his peers are content to retire or embark on endless greatest hits tours?
These are subjects that the famously outspoken Young might have plenty of interest to say. Still, unfortunately, “Coastal” has no interest in exploring them or any other matters of importance. The performance footage is utterly unremarkable—the songs are presented in long unmoving shots that fail to convey the excitement that the best concert films can provide (comparing unfavorably to Demme’s electric work). They’re occasionally embroidered by bits of animation, but they are more distracting than edifying.
Offstage, things are even less interesting. Much of the time is spent seeing him riding on his bus from show to show, either in silence or engaging in “chit-chat” with driver Jerry Don Borden on subjects ranging from the weather to wondering if Howard Hughes had any connections to the entertainment industry. The closest thing he gets to provocation is mentioning from the stage at one point that “I’m so happy I was here before AI was here.” Face it, in terms of radical gestures, that’s no “Ohio” or even “Let’s Impeach the President.”
Clearly, director Daryl Hannah, who is also Young’s wife, was trying to do something here on a small and intimate scale that would match the low-key vibe behind the tour. This yields a couple of sweet moments here and there, Young chatting with her as she films him, but most of it proves to be of little actual interest. Hannah previously directed Young in “Paradox,” a bizarre and mostly forgotten ecologically-minded sci-fi/Western hybrid, and while that film was not very good, at least it demonstrated some genuine ambitions, inscrutable though they may have been. “Coastal,” by comparison, has no particular ambitions to speak of. As a result, it’s such an exercise in tedium that to call it a glorified home movie lends it a gravitas that is doesn’t deserve. That is, viewing countless shots of a coffee mug emblazoned with Willie Nelson’s name is your notion of pure cinema.
The best thing about “Coastal” is, of course, the music. However, the film makes you wait nearly 20 minutes for Young to start performing (a period that does allow us to view the tour bus being slowly parked in real time), including a version of “Mr. Soul” performed on pipe organ, a lively take on his Pearl Jam collaboration “Throw Your Hatred Down,” and an instrumental take on Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” over the end credits. Of course, you can simply go out and purchase the accompanying live album and get the good stuff without all the surrounding nonsense.
As a Neil Young fan who has cheerfully followed him throughout all the highways and byways of his singular career, I have always found him to be one of the most vital and fascinating voices in contemporary music, even at his weirdest. Sadly, the only thing that “Coastal” manages to accomplish is something that I would have usually thought impossible—it makes him come across as a bore.
