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      ‘June’ Review: More Than Johnny Cash’s Wife

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      A new documentary by Kristen Vaurio details the life and career of the singer-songwriter, who was a member of country music royalty.The singer June Carter Cash was born in 1929 into the Carter Family, an influential early country music group, and toured with Elvis Presley in the 1950s. She married Johnny Cash in 1968 and became part of his touring show. She also wrote, with Merle Kilgore, of one of Cash’s greatest hits, “Ring of Fire.”Despite her contributions to music, her solo endeavor in 1999, “Press On,” elicited little interest from the major labels, but the album went on to win a Grammy regardless. Archival footage of its making anchors the new documentary “June,” directed by Kristen Vaurio.The phrase that gave that album its title, “Press On,” is a neat encapsulation of June’s life philosophy. Her love story with Cash, and her perseverance as he battled addictions, is one of the most renowned in the annals of 20th-century celebrity.“I thank God for people like her who still thought I had a little good in me,” Cash said in an archival interview. And John Carter Cash, the sole child of June and Johnny, says of the love his parents shared: “To get a window on that strength and beauty we have but to listen” to their music.The critic Robert Christgau once characterized Carter Cash, who died in 2003, as “that rare thing, an interesting saint: fiery, feisty, creative, proactive.” Contemporary interviews here with the likes of Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris, Carter Cash’s stepdaughter Rosanne Cash and Carter Cash’s daughter Carlene Carter, expand on her gifts, both musical and maternal.The bare facts of Carter Cash’s story are such that the filmmakers would have had to really mess up to not produce a movie that entertains and moves a viewer to tears. “June,” rest assured, does the job well.JuneNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. Watch on Paramount+. More

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      ‘Apolonia, Apolonia’ Review: A Whole Life in Art

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      The painter Apolonia Sokol is the ostensible subject of a wide-ranging documentary about life itself.“For as long as I can remember, I’ve seen the world through my camera,” a woman’s voice says in the early moments of “Apolonia, Apolonia.” Onscreen, we’re watching — presumably through that same camera — a young woman, strong features, entrancing smile, dark circles under her eyes, bearing the expression of a person who’s not afraid of the lens one bit. “But no motif,” the voice continues, “has caught my eye as she did.”The face belongs to Apolonia Sokol, but the voice belongs to Lea Glob, the filmmaker who followed Sokol off and on for 13 years. The pair first met in 2009, and Glob, who is Danish (and speaks mostly in Danish throughout the film), decided to make Sokol the subject of a film school assignment: to create a documentary portrait of a person. She was, she tells us, entranced by Sokol’s life. Raised in a theater in Paris, then in Denmark after her parents split up, having weathered a life-threatening disease as a teen, Sokol returned to Paris when she turned 18 with aspirations to “walk in the footsteps of the great painters.” By that time, the theater (which her father had run) was barely holding on, but Sokol created a world in it nonetheless. That world grabbed Glob and wouldn’t let go.The age-old documentarian’s question — who is really the subject of a nonfiction film? — constitutes a major theme that runs through “Apolonia, Apolonia.” Glob speaks of entering the “magical theater” in which Sokol “played the starring role,” but even as the artist ages, the theater closes and life shifts drastically, Glob stays along for the ride. “Whether I captured Apolonia with my camera or she captured me with her theater, I don’t know,” she says. Glob’s method is observation, without a particular end or point in mind, very nearly to a fault. She even admits, late in the film, that she couldn’t really figure out when to turn off the camera — a question that plagues many an observational documentarian, and most artists and writers, too. Every time Glob thought the film might be finished, Sokol’s life morphed again: a move to New York, to Los Angeles, stints working with artists and for businesspeople. Each time, Glob went back to film some more.This is not the kind of documentary intended to help you learn about the life of the painter Apolonia Sokol. Unless you’re deep in the art world, you may not even know who that is. Instead, it’s a movie about life and how it’s lived, with Sokol’s portraiture forming a pleasing harmony rather than a narrative backbone. The film moves roughly forward in time, but jumps backward and sideways sometimes, as if Glob — in making sense of the present — is remembering something she watched long ago. It’s easy to refashion any artist’s life as a narrative of inevitability, but Sokol paints with no guarantee that she’ll ever break into the mainstream art world. We watch her grueling uncertainty through the eyes of someone who also isn’t really sure what she’s making. The point here isn’t to document the rise of a star, but to observe the process of making.That fact alone sets “Apolonia, Apolonia” apart from the deluge of subject-approved documentaries that have flooded the market and film festivals in the past several years. Those movies are frequently hagiographic, though not inevitably so. The intended audience is the famous subject’s fans, or those who wish to be. Thus these films come with a built-in viewership, which brings along a healthy budget. They’re safe investments for funders and streamers, and the ecosystem is built for them. But they offer few surprises.In a movie like “Apolonia, Apolonia,” however, there’s no obvious path along which the story will unfold when filming begins, which makes it hard to pitch to the people who hold the purse strings. Instead, most of the director’s work comes in the editing stage, when the recurring threads in all that footage become more clear. The subject of this film is expulsion, and the way that Sokol’s story parallels that of women who have been cast from their homes because they refused to fit established molds, and must make new lives elsewhere. This theme is echoed in a more melancholy key in Sokol’s friend Oksana Shachko, a feminist activist whom Sokol took in when she became a refugee from her native Ukraine (and was “already an icon,” as Glob puts it). They live together for years, and describe themselves as a couple, as soul mates, though the nature of their intimacy is kept a bit coy in the film. What matters is their spiritual and creative connection, the support they give to each other in their pursuit of creativity and determination to avoid motherhood.Glob, on the other hand, gets pregnant and bears a child during the course of the filming — a fact that interests Sokol for how it represents a creative woman evolving her life. At the start of the film, the 20-something Sokol seems to be constantly performing for the camera, showing Glob the tapes her parents made of her own conception and birth. But as time wears on, the friendship between them, which slips on and off screen, grows into something more symbiotic. Mirrors appear: Sokol’s youthful illness is reflected in Glob’s life-threatening pregnancy complications. Sokol’s portraiture keeps shape-shifting as she matures as a painter, just as Glob’s portrait of Sokol keeps mutating.“Apolonia, Apolonia” is beguiling as a portrait of women with ambition, but also bittersweet. Glob repeatedly refers to her filming and Sokol’s painting, their work of creating portraits, as cheating death — something they both do in their real lives, too. “The truth is, I never had that control,” Glob says. It took her more than 13 years to understand what she was looking at: “life itself, larger, tougher, and more beautiful than I’d ever imagined.”“Apolonia, I’m going to turn off the camera now,” she says, as we see the smiling face of an older, wiser Sokol, less interested in performance now than in a full life. And then the screen goes black.Apolonia, ApoloniaNot rated. In Danish and French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve Got’ Review: A Lens on a Jazz Luminary

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      Brigitte Berman’s dazzling 1985 look at the self-taught virtuoso clarinetist and bandleader is showing after a restoration.The documentarian Brigitte Berman has made two spectacular pictures about American jazz pioneers. The first, “Bix: ‘Ain’t None of Them Play Like Him Yet’” (1981), chronicled the life of the brilliant and tragically short-lived cornetist and composer Bix Beiderbecke. It screened in a restoration at Film Forum a couple of years back. Now, her follow-up to that movie, “Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve Got” (1985), is similarly restored and booked at Film Forum.Shaw, the clarinetist and bandleader, was a devotee of Beiderbecke, and is interviewed in Berman’s Beiderbecke film. When Shaw walked away from music for a first time, early in what would be a lengthy but nevertheless self-truncated jazz career, he tried to write a novel about Bix. He couldn’t complete it, he says here, because the story had “depth and connotation that I wasn’t philosophically or mentally prepared to cope with.”Shaw was not only a self-taught virtuoso but also often the smartest guy in any room he was in. When he came back to the bandstand, his recording of Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine” was a smash hit of the swing era. An unselfconscious civil rights pioneer, he hired the Black singer Billie Holiday to sing with him at a time when that just wasn’t done.Charming as well as erudite, he married eight times, to Lana Turner and Ava Gardner among others. The marriages didn’t last because of his cantankerousness. The fame he avidly sought in his early years — “like any other American kid, I wanted more of everything,” he notes — eventually struck him as inane and repellent. An all-star roster of interviewees, including the luminaries Mel Tormé and Buddy Rich, contributes to an unfailingly entertaining saga. The movie on its first release did so well — it won an Oscar — that it prompted the ever-unsatisfied Shaw to sue for a bigger share of the picture’s profits.Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve GotNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Down in the Delta’ at 25: When Maya Angelou Considered Reverse Migration

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      The memoirist’s sentimental film speaks to Black Americans returning to the South.Consumed by fears of inner-city violence and the traumatic effects of the crack epidemic, “Down in the Delta” didn’t lead to a career in filmmaking for the writer Maya Angelou. Instead, 25 years later, the inspiring yet uniquely flawed film remains her lone directorial feature.Though a Black fantasy unbound by a specific place and time, it’s a film whose conversations with the socioeconomic realities of the 1990s, the proliferation of hood movies, and the strategy for Black resistance, now, would appear dated. But the script’s idyllic return to the South has newfound resonance for the contemporary reverse-migration taking place in many northern Black neighborhoods affected by the consequences of decades of redlining, deindustrialization and divestment.“Down in the Delta” opens on the South Side of Chicago, where the sound of blaring sirens and hovering helicopters pierce apartment windows, such as the one belonging to Rosa Lynn Sinclair (Mary Alice), the steady mother of Loretta (a perceptive Alfre Woodard), an unemployed single mother who feeds her autistic daughter, Tracy (Kulani Hassen), soda in lieu of milk and, through her drug use, persistently disappoints her only son, the artistically inclined Thomas (Mpho Koaho). To save her family, a vexed Rosa Lynn pawns “Nathan,” a silver-plated candelabra dating to the antebellum period, for bus tickets, sending Loretta and her children to Mississippi to live under the care of their Uncle Earl (Al Freeman Jr.). The sojourn isn’t a cakewalk for Loretta. Not only is she there to sober up, but she must also earn enough money working at Earl’s chicken joint to buy Nathan back, or else permanently lose the heirloom.Considering Angelou’s autobiographies — particularly, “Gather Together in My Name” — you can see why Myron Goble’s script about the power of family appealed to her. Cinematically, kin as a restorative force for Black folks was covered in George Tillman Jr.’s “Soul Food” (1997). And since “Down in the Delta,” “Kingdom Come,” “The Secret Life of Bees” and Tyler Perry’s Madea character have walked similar paths.From the moment Loretta arrives in the Delta, Angelou broadly juxtaposes the opportunities lost and gained between North and South. In the South there’s no crime, poverty, squabbles or gossip. Unlike the young Black men of Chicago, flatly depicted as predators, the people of this genteel town emit rural warmth: The cinematographer William Wages’s honeyed lens captures inviting dirt country roads and lush beds of grass; the composer Stanley Clarke’s tender score further beckons repose.In this town, crack houses, a staple of urban angst cinematically depicted in “New Jack City” and “Jungle Fever,” are replaced with manicured family plots and quaint Queen Anne-style homes. This community longs for the past, whether it’s Earl yearning for Nathan or Earl’s wife, Annie (Esther Rolle), who has Alzheimer’s and pines for her mother. The area’s lone worry is the impending closing of the chicken plant, a threat quietly swept away almost as quickly as it appears.Maya Angelou in the director’s seat on the set of “Down in the Delta.” A quarter of a century later, it remains an inspiring film that is not without its flaws.Ben Mark Holzberg/Miramax Films The importance of the South as a site for restorative justice resides in Nathan, whose frame, in a film prizing trees as markers of time and lineage, carries obvious symbolism. The candle holder’s back story, the bounty for the selling of an enslaved Sinclair, ultimately repossessed by another descendant for recompense, bears in mind the fracturing of Black families during bondage. Earl believes the return of Nathan to Mississippi might revitalize the town, reuniting the family while metaphorically mending the rift between North and South. It’s a wish that inspires the film’s desire for a reverse Great Migration.As early as the 1970s, Black people were already returning South. Though millions of African Americans arrived North to escape Jim Crow violence, in their new communities they discovered some of the same prejudices. The era’s hope and optimism felt by those first migrators, recorded in the painter Jacob Lawrence’s indelible “Migration” series, has been replaced. For instance, in Llewellyn M. Smith and Sam Pollard’s documentary “South to Black Power,” Charles M. Blow, an Opinion columnist for The New York Times, hopes by reclaiming the South, political weight can be consolidated on a state level by Black people.In Angelou’s hands, however, reverse migration isn’t a subversive strategy. Rather it’s an uncomplicated balm. Loretta’s return to loving arms in Mississippi ends her drug habit, gives Tracy her first words, and helps this single mother, who just learned how to add and subtract, envision a future totally unencumbered by institutional racism.Because in “Down in the Delta,” the road to racial uplift is a youth movement cleanly paved by economic self-reliance. When the town’s chicken plant closes, the entrepreneurial Will hopes to acquire it for his dad’s chicken restaurant, a Black-owned small business, to revitalize the area. When Loretta learns how Will helps Black businesses, she dreams of running the factory herself.Financial independence becomes a method for memorializing a storybook past for future generations while imagining newfound prosperity; a dream that has reverberated since 40 acres and a mule were first promised, and then became a nightmare when Tulsa, Okla., burned in 1921. Angelou’s “Down in the Delta” is a retelling of a broken contract that still speaks to migrators today. 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      ‘Occupied City’ Review: Mapping the Holocaust, Street by Street

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      In his four-and-half-hour documentary, the British director Steve McQueen charts the fate of Amsterdam’s Jewish population during the Nazi occupation.Early in Steve McQueen’s extraordinary documentary “Occupied City,” the film cuts to the interior of the elegant main hall in Amsterdam’s grand Royal Concertgebouw. In World War II, the Nazi-German occupiers held events in the hall, but at some point in 1942 the names of the Jewish composers adorning it were covered. Concerts continued, but without Jewish composers, conductors, orchestra musicians, concertgoers and even names on walls.Not long after this section ends, “Occupied City” shifts to a new location, a nondescript, boarded-up storefront. This, the narrator explains, was the site of a cafe that, in 1940, was among the first in the city to ban Jews. Soon after, the movie cuts to another location and then to another and another. And so it goes in this intense, absorbing and epically scaled chronicle — it runs close to four and a half hours, including a 15-minute intermission — that charts the fate of Amsterdam’s Jews during the Nazi occupation, street by street, address by address.In total, the film surveys a staggering 130 addresses, a mapping that McQueen has realized, somewhat surprisingly, without the use of archival imagery. Instead, the director (whose earlier films include “12 Years a Slave”) explores the city’s past exclusively through images of quotidian Amsterdam life today — in and outside homes, in squares, on trams — that he shot over several years beginning in 2019. These 35-millimeter visuals are, in turn, accompanied by sounds that include voices, birdsong and so on recorded during the filming; fragments of music (some composed by Oliver Coates); and the narration (delivered in the English-language version with dry equanimity by Melanie Hyams, a British voice actor).McQueen’s decision to only use images of contemporary Amsterdam in the film is as effective as it is conceptually bold, though it takes time to fully grasp what he’s doing and why. Without ceremony, textual explanation or a flourish of introductory music, he drops you into the city’s gentle and clamorous bustle right from the get go, and there you remain even as the film hopscotches across Amsterdam, covering miles and years. The movie opens, for instance, with a daytime shot of a warmly lit hallway in what looks like an apartment, with a door opened onto a garden. It’s quiet save for the homey sounds of rustling, the metallic tinkling of what seems like silverware and some faintly babbling voices, perhaps from a radio or TV.An unidentified woman enters, and the narration — as it does throughout — begins with a recitation of an address, which grounds you. This was once the office of a printer-publisher who, with his wife and two sisters, died by suicide on May 15, 1940, the day the Netherlands capitulated to Germany. As the woman onscreen opens a trapdoor, the narrator continues, recounting that while many Jews hoped to escape to England, “most could not find a boat willing to take them.” The dead man’s brother did escape, and he transferred the business to an employee, who helped Jews hide in the office. One hid for days “on top of the elevator.”McQueen continues this approach for the remainder of the film, though with striking variations that create linkages, by turns obvious and oblique. In one sunny segment, a cozy spell of pleasure and play becomes a ghost story as you watch people skating on a frozen canal outside a building where a woman sheltered Jewish residents and resistance fighters. Elsewhere, though, McQueen folds in images without commentary, notably in scenes of people protesting against pandemic lockdowns, met by police with water cannons. These images raise the specter of state violence even as the film — with its relentless, harrowing narration — puts the protesters and their freedoms into historical context.As “Occupied City” continues to juxtapose the city’s history with its present — with chronicles of varying length that chart Jewish struggle, resistance, death and survival — the film builds tremendous force. A pilot who shot down German planes before the Netherlands capitulated lived at one address; a 10-month-old baby was taken from another address to a police station; the following year, the baby was murdered at Auschwitz. Amsterdam, McQueen repeatedly reminds you, is occupied by both the living and the dead, an obvious point that takes on specific, deeply profound resonance as the film unfolds. Most of Netherland’s Jewish population, as the narrator reminds you, died in the Holocaust.Among these, alas and of course, was Anne Frank, who’s mentioned a few times in “Occupied City.” It’s notable, I think, that McQueen doesn’t include Prinsengracht 263, the building where her father’s employees kept the business running while she, her family and four others hid in the annex until they were betrayed and eventually deported to Auschwitz. The building is now a tourist attraction, which might be one reason that McQueen avoids it. I imagine that he also wanted to distance the film from the popular, commercially palatable conception of Frank, the one that seizes on her diary’s most famous line — “in spite of everything I still believe people are really good at heart” — and can attenuate the barbarism of her murder.McQueen’s film is “informed,” as the credits put it, by Bianca Stigter’s huge 2019 book “Atlas of an Occupied City (Amsterdam 1940-1945),” which she described in an interview with the BBC as “a kind of travel guide to the past of Amsterdam.” (Stigter, who’s Dutch, and McQueen, who’s British, are married and live in the Netherlands.) She wrote and helped produce “Occupied City,” and she also directed “A Lengthening: Three Minutes” (2022), a feature-length documentary about a segment of a home movie that an American tourist, David Kurtz, shot in 1938 of a Jewish community in a Polish village. Using only images from this fragment, Stigter movingly reclaims a lost world, face by face, second by second.Time is stretched differently in “Occupied City” and passes far more quickly than you might imagine, despite the running time. Some of this has to do with the fluidity of McQueen’s filmmaking and how the disparate parts build power cumulatively. Much of this, though, has to do with how McQueen approaches the past. It’s instructive, for one, that he hasn’t shaped the narration chronologically. Instead, as the film shifts from address to address, and as the seasons and people pass by onscreen, the narration skips from 1940 to 1944 and back again, pausing in moments before and after the war. For McQueen, history isn’t a neat little package that can be experienced at a safe remove and then forgotten. Here, history is in every wintry park and sunlit room because it is insistently present and very much alive.Occupied CityRated PG-13. Running time: 4 hours 22 minutes. In theaters. 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      ‘Barbie’ Makes a Strong Showing on Oscar Shortlists

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      The film is the equivalent of a semifinalist in the song, score and sound categories. “Killers of the Flower Moon” also landed on several lists.Will the Oscars also be living in a “Barbie” world when the statuettes are handed out in March? Maybe, if the shortlists in what’s known as below-the-line categories are anything to go by. The academy released the equivalent of semifinalists for best song, documentary and more on Thursday, and “Barbie,” the director Greta Gerwig’s feminist smash, made a strong showing.Three songs from the film — Dua Lipa’s “Dance the Night,” Ryan Gosling’s “I’m Just Ken” and Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For?” — landed on the list for best song, while the film also showed up in the best score and sound categories.“Killers of the Flower Moon” was also well-represented, appearing on the lists for makeup and hairstyling, song (“Wahzhazhe (A Song For My People)”), score and sound.What about the other film that contributed to our Barbenheimer summer? “Oppenheimer” made the cut in three categories: score, sound and makeup and hairstyling. It tied with “The Color Purple” (for score and the songs “Keep It Movin’” and “Superpower (I)”); “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” (for score, visual effects and the song “Am I Dreaming”); and “The Zone of Interest” (international feature, score and sound).We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Can’t Make It to Broadway? Book and Movie Ideas for Theater Lovers.

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      There are plenty of novels, memoirs, documentaries and livestreaming options sure to satiate fans of theater.A trip to the theater isn’t always possible, especially during the busy — and pricey — holiday season. When a craving for stage drama hits, fear not, there are options. In the world of literature, long-awaited memoirs by Barbra Streisand and Chita Rivera arrived this year, as did the first major biography of the playwright August Wilson. Whether you prefer a live capture of a popular Broadway show like “Waitress,” or a film adaptation of, say, “Dicks: The Musical,” an Upright Citizens Brigade sketch, there is an abundance of musical theater films. (And if all else fails, you can listen to our critics discuss two recent musical-theater highlights or hear the story of the success of “Wicked” from our theater reporter.) Here is a small selection of notable works of theater-related memoir, fiction and film.To ReadViking PressHarperOne‘My Name Is Barbra’Barbra Streisand’s memoir spans 970 pages of print and 48 hours via audiobook. But for an icon of her stature, whose personal life — her Brooklyn upbringing, her celeb lovers, her underdog charm, that famous nose — is almost as mythic as her career, a page count exceeding that of “Ulysses” could be considered restraint. While it’s filled with chatty, personable retellings of stories that may be familiar to Streisand fans, there are plenty of fresh anecdotes too. Alexandra Jacobs called it “a banquet of a book” in her review in The New York Times and advised that “you might not have the appetite to linger for the whole thing, but you’ll find something worth a nosh.” Read the review.‘CHITA: A Memoir’The Broadway legend Chita Rivera wants to share the spotlight with her successors, and so, though her book is a memoir, Rivera kept the next generation in mind while writing it with the arts journalist Patrick Pacheco. In a conversation with Juan A. Ramírez in The Times, she said, “It’s not as much of a memoir as it is an opportunity for kids to realize that if they want this, they can have it — but they have to work hard.” That endless striving earned her three Tony Awards and led to her collaborations with the likes of John Kander and Fred Ebb, Jerome Robbins and Bob Fosse. Her drive shines in this book along with glimpses of snark from her “fire-breathing alter ego, Dolores.”‘August Wilson: A Life’If the seminal American playwright August Wilson were to read his own life story, written by the former Boston Globe theater critic Patti Hartigan, he would most likely do so in the back of a seedy diner, drinking coffee and chain smoking, as he often did. In the first major biography of the playwright, Hartigan chronicles Wilson’s prolific career — including his Pulitzer Prize-winning plays “Fences” and “The Piano Lesson” — and his immeasurable influence on capturing the experiences of Black Americans in the 20th century.‘The Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race’In the scholar Farah Karim-Cooper’s book about Shakespeare and racism, she posits that “love demands that we reconcile ourselves with flaws and limitations.” Karim-Cooper, a director of education at Shakespeare’s Globe Theater and a professor at King’s College London, applies this philosophy to the great playwright, scrutinizing his relationship with race and interrogating how his works shaped harmful Renaissance ideals — while still professing admiration. Pick it up for an expert perspective on a thorny theater subject, or to share a reading list with the prominent Shakespearean actor John Douglas Thompson, who reviewed the book for The Times.Tom LakeWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      ‘Immediate Family’ Review: Unpacking a Musical Kinship

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      The session musicians who helped create the soundtrack of 1970s pop step into the spotlight in the director Denny Tedesco’s documentary.“Immediate Family,” Denny Tedesco’s amiable documentary, could use a subtitle, as it’s not an intimate domestic portrait. It focuses on the currently touring rock band that comprises session players who defined the sound of American pop and rock in the 1970s, while for decades playing with the likes of James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt, Carole King, Stevie Nicks, Jackson Browne, Warren Zevon and more.Tedesco is the son of the West Coast guitar great Tommy Tedesco, and he clearly has a knack for getting musicians to open up. The band members — the guitarists Danny Kortchmar, Waddy Wachtel, Steve Postell; the bassist Leland Sklar; and the drummer Russ Kunkel — all relate their individual bios in relaxed, candid fashion. “Immediate Family” takes its time limning their skills and showing how they survived the 1980s, when session gigs became scarce. (Kortchmar’s remedy was to embrace new music technology and use it to boost Don Henley’s solo career after the Eagles disbanded.)Kortchmar’s playing is always in the service of the song and whatever depths that song is trying to plumb. Kunkel’s drumming is metronomically perfect, with powerful fills. Sklar’s sinuous bass playing reminds one of the influential jazz legend Steve Swallow, with a more pop sensibility. And Wachtel is a rhythm master with a bottomless bag of licks and leads. The chord structure of Zevon’s “Werewolves of London” is elemental, but Wachtel’s practically nonstop nasty embellishments make lines like “He’ll rip your lungs out, Jim” really sing. Postell, a decade younger than Sklar, the most-senior bandmate, has a varied background that includes time with David Crosby, who appears here singing the praises of all of these musicians.Their stories are often funny, like one in which Wachtel recounts hammering out “Werewolves” all night with guest rhythm players Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, only to conclude that they had nailed the song on Take 2.Immediate FamilyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. Rent or buy on most major platforms. More