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To call Jandek a reclusive singer-songwriter is to understate the adjective and overstate his creative powers. Writing for the Phoenix in 1997, Douglas Wolk called him "the longest-running, weirdest, loneliest enigma in popular music" and referred to his tunes, quite accurately, as "monotonous and deeply unpretty and . . . uncathartic and all but completely structureless," removed of "everything about songs but their need to exist and to be heard." Over 25 years and 34 albums, Jandek has avoided interviews (he’s done just two), never revealed his real name or any other biographical details, and never performed live. But Chad Friedrichs’s documentary is less about the artist than about his œuvre: if you know nothing about Jandek before seeing this film, you’ll know very little more about him at the end. ("You may not get all the answers you want," he once wrote an enquirer. "It's better that way.") And it’s hard not to get drawn into the mystery of this indie-rock cipher. Despite a near-complete lack of footage of the subject and only a hint of cooperation from him, the film can be fascinating, but probably only if you’re the kind of person who enjoys long conversations about obscure records. The talking heads — Wolk, collector/critic Byron Coley, K Records’ Calvin Johnson, and Twisted Village proprietor Angela Sawyer among them — offer very few dull moments, and Jandek’s music itself helps sustain the film’s lingering one-chord wonder. Although often atonal and always out of tune, the singer sounds somehow timeless: listening to his creaky, desperate timbre, you can imagine an alternate universe in which Thurston Moore had traveled back to become Robert Johnson. (88 minutes)
BY CARLY CARIOLI
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