Runnin’ Down a Dream: Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers

I don’t really pay any attention to new music, but as a recent convert to the cult of Leonard Cohen, I am now alive to the discovery of old music that I have missed. Thus I was primed for Peter Bogdanovich’s 4-hour documentary on the career of Tom Petty, and indeed I responded as warmly as I did to Scorsese on Dylan, or Demme on Young. Just as my favorite art exhibitions are career retrospectives, which allow one to follow the serial obsessions that inform a life and a body of work, so I am swayed by the story of an artist and a band who have worked continuously and evolved over more than three decades. Any documentary in which you can watch people age before your eyes has a built-in interest, and when the case is effectively made for the importance of the work they’ve done, then you really have something. Even at the length, I could have done with more concert footage, though vintage film and tv are combined nicely with a 2006 concert back in Gainesville FL, where the band came from. Tom Petty emerges as a figure of continuing interest, and the Heartbreakers become vivid both individually and collectively. At the end of the film, like the lab rat I am, I went straight online and ordered a two-disc Anthology of their career, and I suspect I will immerse myself in it as I did with the Essential Leonard Cohen -- the lyrics may not be quite so poetic but are suggestive of an engaging personality, and I’m as ready to rock out as most aging baby boomers. (2007, Sund/T, n.) *7+*