At first, fictional country music up-and-comer Troyal Brux (Mickey Reece) seems like he’ll be the most outlandish presence in Country Gold. The man, for one, is as pompous and aloof toward the crew of a commercial shoot as he is toward his wife and two sons. Then he’s invited out for a night with country legend George Jones (Ben Hall), whose exploits are so comically exaggerated that he makes Troyal seem down to earth. Jones tells stories about killing a man for the mob and being an informant for the F.B.I., while the bulk of the film takes place on the night before he cryogenically freezes himself “like Walt Disney.”
Set in 1994 and shot mainly in black and white, Country Gold is a sort of cringe comedy where Troyal expects to be treated like an equal only to be met by Jones’s casual dismissal of him. The sheer force of Jones’s whirlwind personality crams Troyal into the role of hapless straight man, and Reece, who also directed the film and co-wrote it with frequent collaborator John Selvidge, enhances the sense that the younger man is out of his depth by playing the role with a nasally, babbling energy that sharply contrasts Hall’s gravitas-laden performance as Jones.
Reece’s work is typified by such idiosyncratic flourishes, which add a wild jolt of unpredictability to films that are otherwise easygoing, driven by character and conversation. Country Gold is no exception in that regard, full of bizarre tangents that name-checks parallel universes and cut to detailed pencil illustrations that are sparsely animated by fading from one to the next. Other strange touches give Country Gold a dreamlike quality, like how the voices of Troyal’s sons are inexplicably garbled and one of the film’s songs is delivered by a fetus.
But for all its formal playfulness, Country Gold never loses its grip on the interior lives to its characters, taking their emotions seriously even as it goes for laughter at their expense. The narrative turns from its funny and relatively tidy setup about a new generation of musicians clashing with the old ways to a more dramatic gear, ruminating on the vampiric quality of fame and the business of leaving a legacy behind. Late in the film, an extended flashback even depicts Jones serving as an F.B.I. informant during the Reagan administration.
It’s perhaps no surprise that a film with so many bizarre tangents never quite coheres in thematic terms. Country Gold’s ideas about fame are familiar, and it doesn’t dig deep enough to transform them into something truly profound. Yet neither does the film feel anything but confident and controlled, and as a further demonstration of a distinct and truly weird sensibility, Reece can hardly be faulted for a lack of imagination.
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