Woody Guthrie: This Machine Kills Fascists (E)

Director: Stephen Gammond

Stars: Billy Bragg, Arlo Guthrie, Nora Guthrie

Out to buy and rent: on DVD

“Woody Guthrie was not a saint,” argues the iconic folk singer’s biographer, Ed Cray. “Let’s not deify this man.” To its inestimable credit, Gammond’s film never becomes a hagiography, despite the considerable temptation.

As the narrator Billy Bragg points out, Woodrow Wilson Guthrie has been fundamental to the course of pop and rock history: the first singer-songwriter, he inspired everyone from Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen to the Clash (whose singer, Joe Strummer, insisted on being called Woody as a teenager), and his ability to articulate the concerns of the disenfranchised through song continue to spur would-be protest singers across the globe.

Gammond has tracked down every known piece of footage of Guthrie, which is woven into a chronological narrative almost three hours long, relying on evocative interviews with scholars and contemporaries, including two of Guthrie’s children and his one-time bandmate, Pete Seeger. It is a measured, mammoth film that treats Guthrie’s life and work with all the care and respect it merits.