Good Timing Aids Perceptive Rock Tale

It’s sometimes more important for a documentary filmmaker to be lucky than good. Director Sam Jones turns out to be both, which is why “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” turned into an exciting and involving rock music doc, a smart and satisfying look inside that tumultuous world.

Jones, a well-known still photographer and commercial director making his feature debut, was shrewd enough to pick the Chicago alternative band Wilco as the subject of his first film.

But even he could not have known that the pivotal year he spent following the group would be the most dramatic of its existence, involving painful personnel changes and a widely publicized split with its record company, situations that emerge as the film’s dramatic centerpieces.

The main draw here, as it should be, is Wilco’s music, an adventurous, sophisticated, extremely welcoming sound that has won it an intensely loyal following. Even if you’ve never heard of the group, “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” (named after one of its songs) could well turn you into a fan.

The group’s star and writer of its thoughtful lyrics is Jeff Tweedy, the intensely charismatic lead singer with a captivating voice and the kind of sensitive/poetic good looks that haven’t hurt his fan base. Although Wilco has five musicians when the film opens, Tweedy is always first among equals, the one band member it’s easiest to pick out of a crowd.

“I Am Trying” picks up Wilco in its Chicago loft studio as the band begins to work on what everyone considers to be a pivotal album, the one manager Tony Margherita calls “the record that needs to take the band to another level,” both artistically and commercially.

Although the words “creative process” are considerably overused, one of the virtues of “I Am Trying” is that it puts the band’s method onto film, showing the musicians, in Tweedy’s words, destroying their songs to re-create them in a more arresting manner. We see both how seriously the musicians take their music and the reasons they have for doing so.

“I Am Trying” also captures a classic example of something even more resistant to being filmed, and that is creative differences. To see band member Jay Bennett insistently repeating, “I just want you to understand me” as he and Tweedy wrangle over a not particularly significant musical moment is to understand how much these relationships have in common with marriages, as well as to sense that this association is not headed in a positive direction.

The band handed in the finished “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” album, easily its most ambitious, on the very day that Howie Klein, president of Reprise Records, was leaving the company. It was not a good omen, as Reprise’s new management proved to be less receptive to Wilco’s sound, with all kinds of unforeseen results.

One of the things that makes “I Am Trying” involving is that what happened to Wilco is apparently symptomatic of a kind of dumbing down of the record business that sounds not unlike what goes on with films.

The problem with “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” from a commercial point of view, explains Rolling Stone journalist David Fricke, is that “it doesn’t tell you exactly who it’s for, how it will sell, what it’s about.” In other words, the very things that make it original make it suspect in today’s business world. It’s a paradigmatic tale, and “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” shows us just how it went down.

No MPAA rating. Times guidelines: adult situations.

“I Am Trying to Break Your Heart.”

Released by Cowboy Pictures. Director Sam Jones. Producers Peter Abraham, Sam Jones. Executive producer Gary Hustwit. Cinematographer Sam Jones. Editor Erin Nordstrom. Music Wilco. Running time: 1 hour, 32 minutes.

Exclusively at the Nuart, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., West L.A. (310) 478-6379.