After making one uniquely influential album in 1965, Jackson Carey Frank lived for another third of a century without ever releasing another record. In this compassionate and often deeply moving documentary, the French filmmaker Damien Aime Dupont sets out to explain what made that solitary album so special – and what went so tragically wrong that we never heard from Frank again.
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Recorded in London and produced by his American compatriot Paul Simon, Frank’s album was a gem of finger-picking folk guitar full of striking songs, including the enduring “Blues Run The Game”, since covered by everyone from Bert Jansch to Laura Marling.
Yet in the annals of doomed folk troubadours of the 1960s/70s, his fate was arguably the cruellest of them all. Frank’s tragedy was not that he was cut down in his prime but that he endured a protracted physical and mental agony as he lived on as a paranoid schizophrenic into his late fifties in a twilight world of turmoil and pain, a broken, unrecognisable figure shuffling between living on the streets and time in mental institutions.
The thesis of Dupont’s film – supported by interviews with early girlfriend…
