Forever young

The members of the Young@Heart Chorus defy old-age stereotypes with their spirited renditions of rock 'n' roll songs. (Timothy White/Fox Searchlight Pictures)

The opening shot of the new documentary Young@Heart is a close-up on a forest of stick-like hairs protruding from an elderly woman’s chin. She is in mid-yell, issuing a direct challenge to the audience: This is age, up close and screaming. But the scream isn’t against the dying of the light (well, maybe a little) — it’s a spirited segue into The Clash’s Should I Stay or Should I Go? performed by 92-year-old Eileen Hall.

The strange, sometimes uncomfortable collision of old age and youth culture is the theme of Young@Heart. The film follows a choir of rock n’ roll seniors who gather in the small New England town of Northampton, Mass., to reinterpret pop songs for adoring audiences. The Young@Heart Chorus plays to sell-out crowds in Europe, but remains relatively unknown in the U.S. That anonymity seems likely to end with the release of this film — a hit at Sundance and other festivals — and the singers’ sudden YouTube success.

Stephen Walker, a British television producer, first saw the Chorus perform in London in 2005, at the urging of his common-law wife. During a recent interview in a hotel room in Toronto, Walker admits he wasn’t exactly eager to watch a group of elderly people channel Outkast and Nirvana.

“You think you’re going to see a gimmick, karaoke, a car crash waiting to happen,” he recalls. Instead, he found himself thrilled, soaking several Kleenexes and reveling in the new, richer meaning of songs like the Talking Heads’ Road to Nowhere and the Ramones’ I Wanna Be Sedated when the lyrics are delivered from the mouths of people between the ages of 72 and 88. “I couldn’t believe how the songs were transformed just by who was singing them,” says Walker.

The film director approached the chorus’s musical director, Bob Cilman (a middle-aged Eric Bogosian look-alike) about shooting the group for a documentary to air on BBC television. (An edited version later became the feature film.) Over the 25 years since Cilman started leading the group, several filmmakers had approached him with the same idea, but all of the projects fell apart, with varying degrees of disaster. Not surprisingly, Cilman initially said no to Walker’s request.

“He was very protective of them,” says Walker. “But I’m very pleased he was. Based on experience, people who are really eager to get on television usually have very little to say.”

Walker eventually wore Cilman down, and spent several weeks in 2006 following the group as they prepared for a tour. The film is a process piece, tracking small moments from the day when Cilman brings in sheet music to the new show’s premiere. The songs are by a range of pop, punk and blues artists, and some make lyrical up-with-people sense (James Brown’s I Feel Good), while others are, uh, challenging (upon first listen, Sonic Youth’s Schizophrenia causes at least one singer to plug his ears).

Simply by showing them in the creative act, the film humanizes a segment of the population that’s rarely heard, and almost never heard singing. The singers sometimes kvetch cartoonishly about their aches and pains, but mostly they’re sharp and alive, complaining about the workload, joking around with one another and making beautiful music.

Bob Cilman, the director of the Young@Heart Chorus. (Brandy Eve Allen/Fox Searchlight Pictures)

“It is really telling that it took a British director, a British crew and a British company to make a film about an American chorus,” says Walker. “All the offers to film them came from British productions. No Americans wanted to do it. Maybe it’s true that youth culture is bigger in America than anywhere else.” But even as the singers eschew stereotypes, their age is inescapable: over the course of filming, two key players died suddenly. Walker and his crew stop short of showing the moment when the group learns that one singer, Bob Salvini, has died. At the time the information comes, the group is headed to perform at a prison. A staff member gets on the bus to inform the chorus of Salvini’s passing and Walker captures the group’s reaction on audio only, shooting the school bus alone in a pasture.

“I felt that to film people’s faces when they find out a friend has died was intrusive and gross, but to hear it was acceptable. Many would disagree with me. More brutish people would say you just get in there and film it, others would say you don’t do anything at all,” says Walker. “I felt as a filmmaker it was absolutely essential to register that moment, but not necessary to film it. It would have been incredibly powerful, and incredibly wrong.”

Salvini’s death turned a much-rehearsed duet into a solo for Fred Knittle, one of the chorus’s veterans. A heavy man with oxygen tubes in his nose and his belt Ed Grimley-high, Knittle makes it from his wheelchair to the stage to deliver what becomes the film’s climax, a deep-throated version of Coldplay’s ballad Fix You. A chorus that sounds a little flowery and precious from Chris Martin — “Lights will guide you home/and ignite your bones” — is wrenching from Knittle. The song generates a huge emotional reaction from audiences live, on film and on the internet.

“My favourite review was a journalist who wrote: I haven’t cried this much since Bambi’s mom got shot,” says Walker.

Why exactly does seeing these bent bodies on stage create such an emotional impact? There may be comedy in the dancing-grannies juxtaposition — played up in the slightly awkward music videos interspersed throughout the film — but there’s something more significant about the irony, too; by being in on the joke, the performers erase it. With dignity, they push back against their mortality and remind us of ours. When the group performs Forever Young at a prison in front of a group of young men, even the prisoners break down.

To get this intense effect, Cilman directs his chorus with a picky perfectionism that comes off as respect; he doesn’t infantilize his seniors.

“In the very beginning, there was a different director getting them to sing Where Have You Been, Billy Boy, Billy Boy? — all these kids songs. I thought, where the hell is that coming from? These aren’t kids,” says Cilman. “We’ve stayed away from that. There isn’t condescension toward their age.”

Cilman was an artist and musician in Northampton’s burgeoning early-’80s arts scene. When not performing in experimental theatre or with his band, the Self Righteous Brothers, he worked at a meal site for the elderly, which led to the job leading a senior’s singing group. Cilman knows he comes off as a bit of a hardass in the film, and he’s fine with it. “We’re making art, we’re not doing social service,” he says. “They push me as much as I push them.”

Cilman is now 55, creeping into the age bracket of his performers. “My sense of being older has changed because I’m living it,” he says. “I’m still not where they are, but if I’m having as much fun as they are at that age, I’m going to be really happy.”

Young@Heart opens April 18.

Katrina Onstad is the film columnist for CBCNews.ca.

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