If you watched Ken Burns’ 16-hour “Country Music” documentary when it came out in 2019, you might’ve been wishing that every legend whose life flashed by too fast could get his or her own breakout, but Merle Haggard most of all. The singer-songwriter, who died in 2014, could frankly use a little help on the immortality front, especially if there’s a danger of the novelty song “Okie From Muskogee” becoming the one tune he’s remembered by … a fate that might be slightly worse than total cultural erasure.
Thankfully, he’s found that posthumous benefactor he needed in Ethan Hawke, whose “Highway 99: A Double Album” does Haggard right and then some — although if you’re a true-blue fan, you may think that even a three-hour-plus running time isn’t quite enough. Launched at the Telluride Film Festival, “Highway 99” has a lovely, easygoing rhythm to it, like one of its subject’s train songs, inspired by the days when Haggard was an actual freight-hopper.
Hawke keeps the two-part movie’s energy and interest going past intermission and beyond (yes, there’s an actual “Brutalist”-style time-out clock to tell you when to get back to your seat), by interspersing all the archival footage with performances from about 30 leading lights from the worlds of contemporary Americana and country, from Norah Jones to Jason Isbell. These acoustic cover tunes serve as sweet chapter stops, and with any luck, the film’s title will eventually become literal with a soundtrack album.
All these celebrity guest interpreters aside, it’s still Haggard’s magneticism that’s the main reason to invest this much time in a movie. It may be a measure of just how charismatic he was and is that not just one but two of his ex-wives rejoined his band, the Strangers, after decent divorce intervals. That’s charisma. Or, sure, a paycheck. Or maybe his exes just felt what audiences understood: the lure of a poet laureate who lives to entertain but isn’t timid about wearing his wounded heart out on his sleeve.
The film opens with Hawke narrating and driving around Haggard’s native Bakersfield in his dad’s old car, talking about how he grew up developing a love for “the Hag” via the osmosis of dashboard tapes. The natural fear in these initial moments may be that the famous director is going to make it as much about his own journey as his subject’s, but Hawke turns out to have a pretty solid sense of how much to bring himself back into the picture. Anyway, all those Bakersfield driving shots do serve a filmmaking purpose: Most of Haggard’s most revealing interviews were audio-only, and you’ve got to have something on screen while the late legend is unexpectedly pouring his heart out to some ancient interviewer.
The mentions of Hawke’s father aren’t completely incidental to the main course here. “Highway 99” is in part a tale of Haggard’s lifelong lamenting of the death of his own father at age 9, something he was fairly candid about in memoirs and interviews about carrying as a wound that neither time nor love could heal. Mama tried, as the song famously says, but young Merle acted out by becoming a rather dedicated juvenile delinquent from the time of that death until his early 20s, constantly in and out of jails or other facilities where beatings became a way of life. Who knows if this counted as printing the legend, but Haggard is seen confirming the info that he escaped from 17 institutions before he was 21.
“I’ve had the shit kicked outta me, and I’m surprised at my own integrity, that I don’t hate people,” the star is heard saying. And the more you learn about that rough early going — which included being in the audience at San Quentin when Johnny Cash did his iconic concert there — the weirder it seems that Haggard comes across as a truly tender-hearted soul all the way to the end (assuming that you allow for tender hearts becoming careless or brusque with a succession of five wives).
Haggard could have exploited his “outlaw” past for all it was worth once he became an expert wordsmith and picker, but as the movie makes clear, he was embarrassed to let anyone find out what would have been understood as good branding in this day and age. Finally, it was Cash, who had him on his late-’60s TV show, who outed him as an ex-con, assuring him it’d be fine. But even then, Haggard didn’t exploit his bad-ass past. He’s the guy who titled a song and album “I Take a Lot of Pride in What I Am,” but also the fellow who sang “Sometimes I hate myself and wish I could scream” (in one of his most touching and self-effacingly telling songs, “Sometimes I Dream”). Hawke makes the point that Haggard was not exactly alone among American men of his generation in being driven by the twin poles of pride and shame.
There’s fun stuff in the doc, like Dolly Parton telling Hawke about the time he called in the middle of the night to profess his massive love for her (which she found a polite way to brush off, just the way you’d imagine her doing). Or Rosanne Cash talking about Haggard’s late-in-life fascination with aliens, as expressed in his fondness for the conspiracy radio show “Coast to Coast” (which he once made a four-hour call into, excerpted here).
But the movie is careful to concentrate just as much on his art and all the complications that entailed. As fans well know, Haggard veered from his groundbreaking and seemingly liberal-minded anthem of interracial love, “Irma Jackson,” to the seemingly conservative “Okie From Muskogee” and “Fightin’ Side of Me,” and then going back to making one of his last musical statements a sort of campaign song for Hillary Clinton, “Let’s Put a Woman in Charge.” A walking contradiction, as Kris Kristofferson would put it? Or just someone whose favorite color is deep purple?
Although much of the best material is audio-only, Hawke did manage to get ahold of the complete interview Haggard gave Burns back in 2014. (Rosanne Cash explains that he did it at her behest, at a time when she thinks he knew he was soon to die and wanted to do her a favor.) It’s almost heartbreaking to hear his labored breathing as he talks with Burns, but then the twinkle emerges, and it lights up the screen. At the end of his life, he was still learning to take a lot of pride in who he was. Hawke, for his part, can take some in finally giving a hero such a heartfelt, trenchant and long-overdue screen immortalization.
