And there is also the grand contradiction - missed by many who have covered the Wilco story - of the money. Wilco slams the label for thinking only about money in their decisions about Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and Fricke chimes in with another hard-to-believe-considering-who-it's-coming-from rant about how music isn't about money, but then the triumph at the end of the film is that they sell the record back to the same parent company whose label dropped them, Time Warner, for three times the amount that it took to record it. That's right - both Reprise, the label that dropped them, and Nonesuch, the label that understood them, are owned by the same massive multinational corporation. This makes the band happy? On the basis of what principle? I'm genuinely baffled. I can only make another uncharitable assumption - Wilco is confused about its own principles.

And finally, where is Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in this movie? It's ostensibly the subject, but we hear only very brief snippets of it. Near the beginning, there are a couple of wonderful alternate versions of songs that appear on the record (most notably, "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart"), but much of what we hear of this record is its inception, and not the finished product. The finished product is what is great. The scenes of them making the record are unimpressive, and, sadly, as self-congratulatory as the rest of the movie, pocked with constant reminders of how collaborative and open-minded the band is (the man who says this is later kicked out of the band). Even the extended live sequences miss the mark, focusing on old material that is largely standard four-bar rock and roll, and doesn't even suggest how daring the record in question is. The one old song that truly belongs in the movie, "Misunderstood," is presented for about one minute of its six or seven minute length. Meanwhile, a song off of their first lackluster album "A.M." gets the full treatment, and bores the audience to sleep with its repetitive bombast.

The one bright spot in all of this muck is Tweedy himself, and his voice, and his lyrics. One sequence documents a solo acoustic show he plays in Chicago, and it's a stunner. For the first and last time in I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, I was involved in what was going on onscreen. Here is a very talented man, I thought to myself. This man is going places.