Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind

Gordon Lightfoot may seem like something of a footnote to 1970s folk-pop music in the United States, but this endearingly Canadian documentary reminds us that he’s the near equivalent of Bob Dylan up yonder. The adoring filmmakers — Canadian TV producers Martha Kehoe and Joan Tosoni — have done extensive interviews with Lightfoot himself, now in his 80s, and with a who’s who of Canadian pop-rock: Anne Murray, two members of Rush, Sarah McLachlan, two members of The Guess Who, and many others who will be better known to viewers north of the border. (Among Lightfoot contemporaries, Robbie Robertson and Neil Young are most noticeably absent, perhaps holding on to the belief that they, in fact, are the Bob Dylan of Canada.)

If You Could Read My Mind is not an exaggeration, exactly. Lightfoot has written many timeless classics that remain in steady rotation for singers who need earthy, heartfelt ballads to fill out a record or a performance: “Beautiful,” “Song for a Winter Night” (now a Christmas album staple), “Early Morning Rain.” And that’s in addition to the enduring hits he charted himself, most prominently “Sundown” and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

But the documentary is quaintly skewed in Lightfoot’s favor, so that his infidelities, flashes of anger, and rampant alcoholism are softened in the retelling. Smartly, Kehoe and Tosoni decided to focus on the person and the music rather than the career, so the typical rock bio touchstones of hovering album covers and chart positions are mostly absent. (There is a fun anecdote about Lightfoot opposing the renaming of his first major label LP after its hit song, but it’s less a business lesson than a character study.)

Instead of being shackled to a chronology of albums and singles and tours, If You Could Read My Mind is shaped by Lightfoot’s personal journey, and the songs’ back stories emerge naturally from that narrative. You will never hear “Sundown” the same again, for example, while “Carefree Highway” — a Top 10 hit in the U.S. — is reduced to a sheet music cameo, evidently not locking into any momentous biographical hook.

Also missing from movie is most of Lightfoot’s life from about 1990 until the past few years, including a months-long battle with a near-fatal aneurysm that helps explain why the once rugged outdoorsman now resembles a wraith out of Tolkien. But that episode appears not to have had a musical manifestation, so maybe that’s why it was left out. And while there are plenty of short clips of Lightfoot performing, the movie is too quick-paced to give us a sustained, now-I-get-it sample of his peak showmanship.

But it’s satisfying to see a pop music master who seems, in his late years, still sort of giddy and wide-eyed at his own accomplishments, still apparently pleased to perform. A crack he made between tunes at an Asheville show a few years ago that he was only still on the road in order to pay his alimony bills seemed more posture than complaint. And when he launched into “If You Could Read My Mind,” his breakthrough hit, the years fell away and the glow of his promise and passion shined through. The fact that this movie of the same title is more worshipful than wart-ful provides a similar nostalgic warmth. Nothing wrong with that.

Grade: B-plus. Not rated by PG equivalent. Available July 29 via the Grail Moviehouse’s Sofa Cinema streaming program.

Photos courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment