Coastal: Neil Young's Solo Escape-From-Lockdown Tour Doc is a Revealing Family Affair

By Jim Slotek

Rating: B-plus

A common question thrown one’s way when reviewing music-based documentaries is, “Do I need to be a fan to appreciate this movie?”

The answer - at least as regards the personal, quirky and often outright funny Neil Young mini-tour doc Coastal - is yes, you do.

More than that, it would help if you were a deep-dive fan, hungry for ephemera and eager to hear stuff Young has rarely, if ever, played for an audience.

Or as Young told the crowd at the Hollywood Hills’ Ford Amphitheatre in the opening of his free-wheeling, sometimes ragged, post-pandemic solo tour, “You’re going to hear all the songs you didn’t want to hear because you never heard them before.”

Young was having them on, a bit. There are a few very well-known tunes (Comes a Time, I Am a Child, Vampire Blues) in this feature-length chronicle, directed by Young’s wife Daryl Hannah. Some of them come with a story. He introduced his wonky pump-organ version of Buffalo Springfield’s Mr. Soul with the tale of how he bought the organ “in a pawn shop in Redwood City.” His rendition of the Springfield’s Prime of Life introduced the audience to the beat-up guitar Stephen Stills gave him more than a half-century earlier.

And everything he played on piano was plunked on an ancient Steinway that had survived a fire.

Oh, and just for ambience, Young’s Lionel train set did laps onstage.

Coastal, shot in black-and-white with homemade, arty post-production, is playing in theatres across the U.S. and Canada for one day this week, Thursday, April 17. For Torontonians, it’s a tantalizing taste of Young in advance of this summer’s full-band world tour.

Young keeps up a jokey front throughout this saga of his first public performances in four years. He talks more to his audience than he has in many an interview. But there’s an uncertainty underneath. The man will be 80 this year, and isn’t exactly ageless. That is, until those slightly swollen fingers and grey-haired knuckles find their home on a keyboard or guitar neck. We even hear him doing voice exercises before his first show (Neil Young does voice exercises, who’da thunk it?)

His confidence increases (and the stories get punchier) as the tour progresses. The lesser-known songs start becoming earworms for the crew. Of the older tunes that often sat in obscurity, he says, “I understand them now.” The closing song, Love Earth, is fretted over in the movie’s opening, and turns out to be a simple, old-school C-Am-F-G ditty, suitable for audience participation. At other times, he’ll pick up an electric and give the crowd a noisy taste of Crazy Horse-ish ragged glory.

But the best moments in Coastal happen offstage. There’s great old-man give-and-take between Young and his private tour bus driver Jerry Don Borden as they make their way from Young’s Broken Arrow Ranch to L.A., whether it’s the weather, traffic or tales of dead mice on the bus of country legend Ernest Tubb. We get glimpses of the relationship between Young and Hannah, and between the singer and his adult son Ben, who has cerebral palsy.

And we see the light start to shine in the folk-rock legend as he emerges from hibernation with the rest of the world.

Coastal. Directed by Daryl Hannah. Stars Neil Young, Jerry Don Borden, Daryl Hannah. In theatres for one day only, Thursday, April 17.