Mark Reviews Movies: DAVID CROSBY: REMEMBER MY NAME

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 25, 2019

For a few decades, David Crosby has believed he should be dead. He was a founding member of the Byrds, as well as the trio—Crosby, Stills & Nash (CSN), which was sometimes the quartet Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (CSNY), whenever Neil Young joined them—that bore his name. A two-time inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (once for the Byrds and again for CSN), Crosby hopes he'll get in a third time for his work with CSNY, which he argues is completely different CSN. Plus, it'll make Eric Clapton jealous.

Before all of the late-career accolades, Crosby, as it so often happens in the world of music, became an addict—to cocaine at first and later to heroin, too. So many of his friends and fellow musicians, people who knew directly or simply admired, died—and died young—from their addictions. In David Crosby: Remember My Name, though, there's the man of the title, still recording music and performing in front of audiences at the age of 76 at the time of the documentary's filming (He's 77 now and about to have another birthday).

This film is a thoughtful and painfully honest examination of Crosby's life then, as a famous musician whose life very nearly spiraled out of a control, and now, as a musician who's trying to get as much out of his career while he still can, as well as a man who's still reckoning with the demons of his past and his personality. It's a collaboration between director A.J. Eaton, who films the entire project and questions Crosby while taking a trip across the old haunts of his life, and Cameron Crowe, the filmmaker (a producer for this film) and rock journalist who oversees a series of more intimate interviews with the musician.

This isn't just a fine biography, which is as much about its subject's internal life and personal struggles as it is about a chronology of events. It's also a pointed and melancholy study of growing older, while accumulating more regrets than could be resolved in an entire lifetime—let alone whatever time this particular man has left in him.

"Time," as Crosby puts it in one of his interviews with Crowe, "is the final currency." He knows he doesn't have much left to spend. The singer/songwriter has had a liver transplant. He's living with type 2 diabetes (There's a rather ironic shot of him, after explaining his encounters with heroin, using a different type of drug kit—a blood test and insulin injection). Eight stents have been placed in his heart. That's as many as doctors can put in there, so a heart attack of any kind would almost assuredly be the end of him.

Crosby knows all of this, but he keeps performing. He loves his family, especially his wife Jan, who has stood by him for almost 40 years and through a lot of the bad times, but as much as he hates leaving them—perhaps for the last time—to go on tour, the music beckons. Crosby won't refuse that call, because, if he couldn't sing and play music, he doesn't think there'd be any reason to live.

The man says all of these things and more directly during his interviews with Crowe, who has interviewed the man at least one other time when the now-filmmaker was exclusively a journalist. Crosby admits that his daughter won't speak to him, that Young hates him, and that Graham Nash, his collaborator who stood with Crosby like a brother through some ugly times, won't talk to him, either. He could understand the idea of one person turning from a friend to someone who hates his guts. Many more than one person have had that transformation in their feelings toward Crosby. He readily confesses that this isn't just a coincidental pattern. It's his fault and no one else's.

We don't expect such plain honesty in these documentaries. The filmmakers often let their admiration for their subject get in the way of seeing the obvious. We certainly don't expect such honesty from the subjects of such movies, who surely will admit to errors—but only so far as they can excuse or justify their mistakes.

Here, though, there are no apologetics from Eaton, who still clearly holds Crosby in some esteem, if the trip down memory lane, taking Crosby from one point of interest to the next as the musician recalls his personal life and career (intercut with the usual dispersal of archival footage, although the stories accompany that footage are far more personal than just a highlight reel), is any indication. There are none from Crowe, who conducts his interviews without hostility but with plenty of bluntness. There definitely isn't any justification from Crosby himself, who has had decades to make mistakes and obviously feels the need to confess. At one point, Crosby even admits that he lied to Crowe during their first interview so many years ago, when he said that his father believed, in the end, having friends is all that matters in life. Now, without any friends left, he realizes how truthful that lie actually was.

It seems as if Crosby knows this is the least he can do to make some form of amends. He's going to do at least that, especially if he can't apologize directly to the people he's wronged. In that vein, there's a striking moment: When Crowe asks what's preventing Crosby from showing up at Young's doorstep to apologize, the singer despondently says he doesn't know where his former friend, colleague, and sometimes-bandmate lives anymore.

Late in David Crosby: Remember My Name, Crosby jokingly suggests that, maybe, he has been lying to the filmmakers this whole time, in some way to manipulate the general sentiment toward him or, perhaps, to make certain, specific people think better of him. Some might take that statement to heart and look at the man's confessional here with some skepticism. That might be a worthwhile position to take, if Crosby even suggested he has changed in some significant way. He never does, and he seems to know he probably never will. If that's not honesty, the term has become meaningless.

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