The making of the band

"This is going to be a film about a band called Wilco," says a beer belly smoking a cigarette; or, more accurately, Wilco's singer/songwriter Jeff Tweedy's beer belly smoking a cigarette. The face has been drawn on his beer belly with a black sharpie and the cigarette is secured in his belly button by a piece of gum.

And the rest of the film I Am Trying To Break Your Heart is essentially a reflection of this opening sequence: it is about a ridiculous situation turned into a triumph.

Anyone familiar with the Chicago-based folk/rock band already knows this story. It is the tale of Wilco's fourth and arguably best album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. The film details the ensuing difficulty of releasing the album after being shamelessly dropped by Reprise Records. But this documentary goes further than that struggle _ the film is an expose of the hypocrisy of the music industry.

The irony of Wilco's story is that after being dropped from Reprise _ facing a struggle which caused one of the band's founding members to leave _ Wilco signed with Nonesuch Records, owned by the same mother-company as Reprise: the infamous Time Warner. The beauty of this triumph over the industry is that Reprise paid the group over $100,000 to make the album, and then dropped them only for Time Warner to indirectly buy the album back for nearly twice the price. As if it could get any worse for Time Warner, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was one of the most talked about, critically-acclaimed albums of the year.

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is a groundbreaking, sonic journey through excellent songwriting, quirky textures (kitchen appliances appear as percussion in one song), and deeply introspective lyrics. The movie lends a great deal of insight into the creative processes that led to these innovations. Reprise basically rejected the album for commercial reasons. Like the few clueless imbeciles who canned OK Computer when it was first released, Reprise failed to let the album sink in.

After listening to the album once, the label decided that either the band had to change the album, or the band was to be dropped altogether. Disgusted, Wilco decided to turn the other cheek, and paddle against the crosscurrent of commercial success and artistic achievement. He managed to achieve both.

I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, named accordingly after the first song on Yankee Hotel, is a gritty documentary, directed by the award-winning photographer Sam Jones. What you get in this movie is bitter, unrelenting honesty. You won't find any glamour, sex, or drugs here, and if you're looking for them you're better off watching Meat Loaf's Behind the Music. The film bears an intense realism, as a result of Sam Jones' direction.

The tone of the movie is completely congruent to the album's avant-garde dreariness _ I am sure of this because it didn't occur to me that the movie was filmed in black and white until the very end as I was shuffling out of the theater. The tension between the characters is all real, literally, because here you will find no scripts or costume designers or screenplays _ simply an accurate portrayal of one of modern music's most interesting and previously underrated bands.

I Am Trying To Break Your Heart is essentially a film for pop music fans who are disgruntled with the hypocrisy of the music industry. Wilco fans will enjoy the rare live and studio footage. If you've never heard of Wilco and don't like pop music, then you probably will not like this film. It is, nevertheless, entertaining, humorous, and starkly impacting. I Am Trying To Break Your Heart succeeds in its goal of documenting one rock band's struggle against the machine