THURSDAY, OCTOBER 22 at 8 PM

Join us for a special 10th Anniversary screening of this pivotal music documentary! We can’t celebrate Townes Van Zandt without live music, so EPFC is happy to present a live set by musician Austin McCutchen. Hailing from Missouri, Austin’s unique brand of country, bluegrass and rock ‘n roll has been making an impact in Los Angeles and New York. If you missed his packed shows at the Echo this summer, you get another chance to hear him live tonight.

“I’d like to write songs that are so good nobody understands them, including me,” the Texan singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt remarks half-seriously in Margaret Brown’s tender, impressionistic film biography, “Be Here to Love Me.” The words evoke the images in many of the songs written by Van Zandt, a country-folk troubadour who died of a heart attack on Jan. 1, 1997, while recovering from a broken hip; he was 52. Ms. Brown has gathered an impressive array of clips from television interviews and live performances and arranged them into a rough chronology. His story, told in bits and pieces, is a mostly sad one of an unstable, unlucky man, the son of a wealthy Fort Worth oil executive, fending off demons. Here, as in so many other documentaries about troubled musicians, the word genius is casually tossed around. But does every unstable, self-destructive artist defiantly living on the edge qualify for that description? In Van Zandt’s case, maybe yes. — Stephen Holden, New York Times. Director Margaret Brown in attendance! 

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