Front and back cover - Video review of The Music Never Stopped

THE MUSIC NEVER STOPPED: Healing the 60s generational divide [video review]

Last updated: March 26th, 2019

Front cover - Video review of The Music Never StoppedTHE MUSIC NEVER STOPPED:
Healing the 60s generational divide

Jim Kohlberg

[Roadside Attractions, 2011, 1 hr 45 minutes]

Many people know of the film Awakenings, based on a book by celebrated storyteller-neurologist Oliver Sacks, because it stars Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro. Very few people seem to have heard of The Music Never Stopped, a film that’s equally powerful, if not more so, because it has no big-name actors. It’s based on Sacks’ essay, “The Last Hippie,” from another one of his books, An Anthropologist on Mars.

I happened to see the DVD on the shelf at my local library recently, while my wife and I were Netflix-less for a few days. I’d snagged a couple of murder mysteries, but we try to keep ourselves from falling totally into that bag. The blurb on The Music Never Stopped seemed promising, so I checked it out, and a few days later popped it into the DVD player.

I can’t remember ever before seeing a cinematic treatment of the generational divide in the late 1960s that felt true to what I experienced with my own parents. In the first half hour of this film, it became clear to both my wife and me that it did capture the essence of that total disconnect and the terrible impossibility of things being otherwise.

The young protagonist and his parents have a severe falling-out one night in the late 60s. He leaves their home in the New York City area to live in Greenwich Village, pursuing his musical dreams that symbolize his rift with his middle-class family. The next time they hear of him is 20 years later. They receive a phone call from a hospital he’s been admitted to with a brain tumour which is benign, but nevertheless has caused him severe memory and behavioural problems, even prior to the operation to remove it.

The parents are, of course, both grateful and horrified at the same time during their reunion with their son. He’s a nice-looking fellow, now in his late 30s, but he doesn’t seem to remember them, or to be fully present in consciousness.

The film gradually treats us to a series of well-done flashbacks, showing the son as an attractive late-adolescent who was the leader of a hippie-ish, but relatively clean-cut band. All the beauty of the Summer of Love comes through these scenes. We’re gradually brought in on the irreducible issues which drive the family apart and the drama of the night when things come to a head.

Finally, the bereaved father, who has a presence in the movie at least equal to that of the son, goes on a desperate search for anything that promises the slightest shred of hope. He succeeds in finding a music therapist who has done work with people with memory loss, like those we’ve all heard of, who “come alive again” when bathed in the music from the prime of their lives. Through an enchanting coincidence, the therapist finds the key to re-awakening the young man, at least for the duration of their musical sessions together. But to reconnect with his son, the father has to renounce what he believed was the “right” way, and embrace the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, The Beatles and all the other great musical acts of the 60s.

As you watch, your tears will bathe you in love’s triumph. This movie was like a miracle for my wife Barbara and me, re-awakening in both of us memories that have slept for 40 years.

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