Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus

This is a charming and very beautifully photographed documentary about religion and music in the modern South, featuring a soundtrack by the haunting Jim White as well as The Handsome Family, Cat Power, Sixteen Horsepower and a bunch of other performers who sound like they’ve eaten lots of possum while sitting on their verandahs. Director Andrew Douglas, whose only other film is, strangely enough, the 2005 remake of Amityville Horror, keeps it short and sweet here, finding what makes the South so unlike the rest of the country, and so unlikely to rise again. Douglas portrays Louisiana as a place where you’re either an outlaw or a fundamentalist Christian, which is kind of cool, if a somewhat fictional take on things. But then, as cult writer Harry Crews says in one of his many short segments in this film, “everything is stories.”