A yearning and damaged heart

Think of Townes Van Zandt as the beautiful but doomed Lord Byron of Texas singer-songwriters. Dead of a heart attack in 1997 at age 52, he was supremely gifted, stone cold charismatic and prone to the fatalistic romanticism of self-destruction. If you haven’t heard of him, a lot of people you have hold his gifts in awe.

“Be Here to Love Me,” Margaret Brown’s engrossing and poignant documentary on Van Zandt, is filled with appearances by celebrated performers who are simply fans of this legendarily troubled figure with the aching voice and haunted Lincoln-esque look.

Willie Nelson (who had a No. 1 hit with Van Zandt’s “Pancho & Lefty”), Emmylou Harris, Kris Kristofferson, Jerry Jeff Walker, Steve Earle, Guy Clark and Joe Ely offer tribute to the man Earle calls “the best songwriter in the world.” Says Clark, “His songs just took your breath away.”

Aside from “Pancho & Lefty,” Van Zandt’s best-known works include the classic “If I Needed You” and “Waiting Around to Die.” He was a poet who wrote the most allusive lyrics, and the more his words didn’t spell things out -- he claimed he’d written “If I Needed You” in his sleep -- the more listeners were drawn in. “I’d like to write some songs that are so good nobody understands them,” he told an interviewer. “Including me.”

Van Zandt also wrote songs from a yearning and damaged heart, songs that touched troubled people deeply because he understood pain and loneliness but transcended it in his music, if not in his life.

To explore that life and put it on film, first-time director Brown has scoured the Earth for Van Zandt material. She has interviewed each of his children and all three of his wives, old high school pals and rival professional associates who likely aren’t speaking to each other.

Brown has also tracked down home movies from her subject’s affluent childhood (his great-grandfather drafted the Texas Constitution and a county shares his name), taped telephone calls as well as interview and performance footage from around Texas and the world.

Even as a teenager and young adult, Van Zandt’s connection to life was uneasy. He was addicted to glue sniffing while in high school, and after allowing himself to fall out of a fourth-story window to see what losing control felt like, he was committed to a mental hospital by his parents and subjected to electroshock treatments that destroyed many of his childhood memories.

Determined to have a career as a singer-songwriter, Van Zandt decided, in his own words, that to be successful “you had to blow everything off -- money, security, happiness -- to make it.” This go-it-alone attitude helped fuel his legend but was agonizing for his family, and his oldest son, J.T., pointedly asserts, “If that kind of behavior feeds your addictive personality, it’s a weak move, not a strong one.”

That Van Zandt had an addictive personality, a yearning for drugs up to and including heroin, and a fascination with guns and death is certainly amply documented. Some stories, for instance losing front teeth that became stuck to airplane glue, sound exaggerated, while others, such as an episode of Russian roulette, feel uncomfortably genuine.

Van Zandt looks increasingly sepulchral and wasted as years go on, but because he is so genteel on screen, we never lose patience with him. We simply share the sad wish, visible on the faces of all those who were close to him, that it could have been otherwise. A key reason we tolerate Van Zandt is that his music was so special. In fact, the only problem with this moody, collage-like documentary is that though it offers selections from about two dozen of his songs, it allows almost none of them to be played through to the end. To hear the start of Van Zandt doing “Pancho & Lefty” and not be allowed to hear it in its entirety creates a kind of pain all its own. The song is that good.

*

‘Be Here to Love Me’

MPAA rating: Unrated

Times guidelines: Considerable alcohol and drug references, language

Released by Palm Pictures. Director Margaret Brown. Producers Margaret Brown, Sam Brumbaugh. Executive producers Paul Stekler, Louis Black. Cinematographer Lee Daniel. Editors Karen Skloss, Don Howard, Michael Taylor. Music supervisor Jonathan McHugh. Running time: 1 hour, 33 minutes.

Nuart Theatre, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., West Los Angeles.