This film gets my highest recommendation, so go see it.

With that said, you may not want to read further. If you haven’t seen it yet, some of the things I am going to discuss will fall into the “spoiler” category.

One question that this film brought to mind has to do with the color barriers in Apartheid dominated South Africa. It’s clear from the film that Rodriguez’ fans were mainly white South Africans and that Rodriguez’ political influence was on them. So what I am curious about is what would have been Rodriguez “color” status in Apartheid South Africa? Would he have been considered “white” or “colored?” Could Rodriguez have performed in concert in South Africa in  the 1970s? Was part of Rodriguez enigma and attraction to white South Africans (Afrikaners included) the fact that he was what some Americans nowadays call a “person of color?”

Innumerable questions come to mind about the corruption of the music business, then and now. Who got the money from Rodriguez’ albums significant sales in South Africa is never answered. Who is getting the bucks from the current CD sales is never examined, though things seem to be pointing back to Sony, who at least seems to be one of the backers of this film. We do learn the Rodriguez got the money from his South African concerts and chose to give much of it away.

But, the heaviest artistic question that this film raises is about the quality of Rodriguez’ lyric writing (and possibly his performing), and which leads to why his music never had much success in the States. It seems this last question may be perhaps ascribed to poor promotion and poor conjunctions of events, but we’ll probably never know for sure.

I personally think his singing style was a little too reminiscent of the early Bob Dylan, and Dylan and Rodriguez may have been in too close proximity for Rodriguez to compete effectively. (I should say that I am not a great fan of Dylan’s lyrics, feeling that they are generally much too abstruse.)  Maybe a better comparison in terms of the songs themselves is to Leonard Cohen’s first two albums, released  a couple of years earlier. Of course, forty years of covers make Cohen’s songs echo in our consciousness, (think Bird on a Wire) but Rodriguez’ songs like I Wonder, are certainly up there with the best songs of this era. And we’ll never know what forty years of obscurity have cost us. Thank goodness, at least, for the South Africans and their tenacious devotion to a singer-songwriter who spoke to their hearts. So, although this is a film of great joy, it is also one of great sadness–  of, dare I suggest, the “invisible hand” of the marketplace gone completely haywire.