You’ll get a strong sense of who country singer and songwriter Elizabeth Cook is the second she starts crooning in Katy Chevigny’s “The Easy Kind,” hauling out one of her signature songs, “Sometimes It Takes Balls to Be a Woman.” Things do get a more slippery from there, because while there is indeed an Elizabeth Cook who is a country singer and songwriter, there’s also the lightly fictionalized version of Elizabeth Cook who populates Chevigny’s narrative film (and who, for the sake of a little line-drawing between fact and fiction, mostly goes by “EC”). Both of them, it’s worth noting, are the kind of lady who would write — hell, who would live — a song about how demanding it can be to exist as a woman. All of it takes balls.
While a working knowledge of the real-life Cook might help smooth out some of the rougher edges of Chevigny’s drama, from the start, it’s clear Cook is somebody. Not just because she’s an instantly vivacious presence on the big screen, but because Chevigny has found some heavy-hitters to join her up there, including Karen Allen, Susie Essman, and yes, David Letterman himself (the Letterman thing will make more sense later, but it does telegraph some gravitas, and quick).
Chevigny first met the real Cook in Nashville nearly a decade ago, where the filmmaker was taken with her talent and her outspoken nature, two details that carry over to this fictionalized take on Cook’s current life. Like EC, Cook was groomed for country glory — she often repeats the story about her “hillbilly singer” mom and her moonshine-running dad, who spent much of their marriage playing in bands all around Florida (not beach Florida, we’re reminded) — but the cookie-cutter nature of Nashville didn’t jibe with who she was on a cellular level. Both Cook and EC had record contracts when they were younger. Both of them asked to be removed from them.
We’ll stop listing the parallels between Cook and EC, mostly because they’re so many of them, and ticking them off does nothing to diminish or add to the power of Chevigny’s narrative here. There’s a reason why Chevigny and Cook opted to make a fictionalized feature film, not a documentary, and while we suspect Cook would be appealing in either medium, it’s most useful to engage with the one we’ve got for now, which we also suspect allows Cook a different kind of freedom to tell her story.
EC’s life has always been something of a battle, sharing the tale about that broken contract is just most emblematic of it. These days, she’s got a few smaller gigs (despite playing at the Grand Ole Opry over 400 times), a tiny tour, a few endorsements (though her makeup people get real gunshy when she ends up the victim of a minor social media kerfuffle), an expected new album, a popular radio show, a nonexistent love life, and a leaky roof. She’s also got plenty of heartbreak: a friend has just passed away while she’s been out on the road, and as she later explains it, it’s just the latest death in a long, long string of them.
EC hides a lot of that with her flashy clothes and mess of blonde hair, but even at her most jittery and undone, she’s a major talent. But you don’t have to know much about the country music scene — though EC will tell us again and again — to understand why her brassy, bold brand of music and attitude didn’t really fly in the rarefied halls of Nashville. EC has been fighting so long that it seems like she’s unsure how to stop, turning casual chats with friends into big fights, or using her radio show to overshare how she’s feeling about all manner of things.
Chevigny, who also wrote the film’s script, eschews expected narrative beats to tell EC’s story. We do expect that she’ll learn some things, make some moves, keep growing up, fall back into bad habits, and maybe even get the recognition for her work that she deserves, and plenty of that happens here, but the filmmaker doesn’t always unspool her story in traditional ways. Sometimes, EC slips back into memories (many of them involving a former lover that, while illustrative of her current romantic status, feel a little out of place). More successfully, Chevigny threads in real Cook performances and plenty of archival footage of her singing at a young age that add just the right amount of veracity to “The Easy Kind.”
The filmmaker’s documentary background also adds that kind of touch to the film, which so often feels like we’re watching something, well, true. We are, though, even if it’s a different kind of truth, a scripted one, it’s still sprung from the same well of experience. Elizabeth Cook has plenty of it, now it’s time to keep finding new places for it to shine.
Grade: B
“The Easy Kind” premiered at the 2024 Telluride Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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