Before Austin’s tech boom and ensuing personality change, it was mostly known as a (cosmic) cowboy enclave, helmed by the likes of Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, David Allan Coe, and Blaze Foley. Heartworn Highways is an intimate, taped-together VHS, day-to-day look into what it was really like for the musicians whose work is now the stuff of legend, but whose lives looked a lot like some of our friends’ do back then. Watching Clark fix a guitar or being in the room for a Christmas party at Guy and Susanna Clark’s house might specifically tickle die-hard country fans, but it’s the satellite scenes including Austinites of all stripes, some born before the turn of the 20th century, that flesh out this ambient portrait of our place in a different time. – Lina Fisher
July 3-4
