Luke: Documentary on musician John Murry “captures some very moving moments”

A lone man in a suit and bowler hat stands at the edge of a cliff, less than an inch away from the watery abyss swirling below him. 

One step separates this man, singer-songwriter John Murry, from certain oblivion. It’s a place he’s been before. Spiritually and physically. 

And it’s a place filmmaker Sarah Share visits many times in documenting the harrowing events in Murry’s life. 

Or should that be “lives”? By his own count Murry is on a second or third chance at living. He’s faced death before, plummeting to rock bottom just as he was poised for greatness. 

Addiction to painkillers and heroin nearly took everything from him. But against the odds, Murry is alive to tell his story in his own words in The Graceless Age: The Ballad of John Murry.

From Ireland to Mississippi 

In 2013 Murry and his longtime collaborator and mentor Tim Mooney recorded alt-folk album The Graceless Age, which was released to critical acclaim. 

Taking the top spot on Uncut’s year-end list and ranking among the year’s best records in American Songwriter, The Guardian and Mojo. 

But a near-fatal overdose while recording wrapped on The Graceless Age, followed by years of creative frustration and exhaustion in the wake of the success of that debut album left Murry in freefall. 

The film’s director, Sarah Share, meets Murry at the end of a long struggle with personal and professional demons. Now settled in Ireland, Murry has gotten clean. 

In the film, Murry suggests that Ireland shares a lot of qualities with the American South. Or at least what he sees as the South’s better qualities – friendly people living quiet lives. 

In Ireland, Murry finds acceptance and community among audiences and musical peers alike. A montage early in the film shows Murry joining in with buskers on street corners, playing to rapt crowds in pubs and attending a folk festival in Kilkenny. 

There, a fan hangs off of Murry after his set, slurring through tipsy words of adulation. “This man”, he mumbles, holding on to John to keep from falling, “has a beautiful soul”.

Share follows Murry as he travels from Ireland back to his home state of Mississippi for the first time in years. Murry’s “beautiful soul” goes searching in the darkness of a world he left behind a couple of lives ago. 

“Why are the things I’m running from always faster than me?” he asks while driving toward his hometown. 

Share’s camera follows Murry’s nervous gaze. The bright sun illuminates and highlights the grime on the rented car’s windscreen. No amount of wiper fluid can hide that.

Angels and demons

For Murry the past is ever-present. In his music, in the influence of his adopted family, and in the dirt and air of his hometown of Tupelo, Mississippi. 

Murry’s adoption made him the second cousin of the Mississippi writer William Faulkner, he says. A figure that lived as large in the family history as he does in the rest of the world. 

Murry sees a lot of parallels to Faulkner in his own life. Faulkner is not so much an inspiration to him as he is a chronicler. Those times when their lives mirror one another in hospital stays, and treatment for addiction. 

Faulkner has a huge place in Murry’s life, he’s able to recite passages by heart. 

Share, the director, accompanies Murry as he visits his old stomping grounds and areas of personal and historical interest in Tupelo. 

Murry talks to the camera throughout the film. We don’t hear the offscreen prompts or questions. We feel like dust on the windscreen, observing by accident. 

Sentences spill out of his mouth too quickly. They’re long and overstuffed with words. Too many thoughts to contain. Murry is conducting conversations with himself that start and end and then start again in seconds. 

He speaks to the moment, of the moment, and with the weight of a lifetime of missed opportunities, second chances and what-could-have-beens. World-weary yet naive. 

He speaks about oppositions constantly, balance and imbalance are on the forefront of his mind at all times. The film opens with him wondering, “How did this happen? You’re making an album they call genius and end up broke.” 

Angels and demons, good and evil, then and now, all existing together in one unbroken thought. In his music, his life, his times, his very being. 

Roots

Share captures some very moving moments in her travels with Murry. 

He is reunited with the same organist that played accompaniment when he was a choirboy. They sing a duet and Murry becomes bashful and childlike in his mannerisms. 

A chance encounter with a fan at a petrol station shows the wide-ranging appeal of Murry’s music. 

He later takes his daughter on a tour of Tupelo landmarks, including the shotgun shack where Elvis Presley once lived.

Murry is, in his own words, a “song and dance man” like Elvis. Murry’s stage presence is honed and deliberate. He dresses like Gene Chandler, or a very spiffy undertaker, and like The King. 

Exhaustive

Unlike Elvis, John Murry is not an actor as well as a singer. Share frequently calls on him to act, as she over-orchestrates material that would be better treated as actuality. 

For example, a visit to Murry’s childhood home is intercut with a child actor playing a younger Murry. The camera hangs on a long take of Murry smoking a cigarette then turning away without entering the house.

What’s interesting about John Murry is John Murry. It’s easy to be drawn into the drama of his life through his words alone. 

The sequences where Share employs more elaborate set-ups and techniques don’t bring us closer to Murry. 

Intercutting between the singer and a child actor playing a younger version of himself isn’t as affecting as, say, the sequence with the fan in the petrol station. 

When Share observes in a candid style and lets the world come to Murry there’s magic there. Even though it is undoubtedly curated, it doesn't feel like it. 

The rawness compliments John’s style more than any cinematally handsome and choreographed sequence could. 

And unfortunately, they stand in for something that already exists in a more meaningful way: Murry’s music. Songs and lyrics are used in many sequences, but they’re only ever snippets. 

So the feeling is that we follow Murry, hear of his hardships, the lowest lows, a lifetime or two of pain and anguish, but never really have a chance to hear and feel how it all coalesces into his art.  

The result is that The Graceless Age is an exhaustive study of John Murry, the man, but falls short as a celebration of Murry the artist.     

The “Graceless Age: The Ballad of John Murry” is in cinemas nationwide from 2 May. You can watch a trailer here.