Enjoy free music documentary screenings at the Harris Theater as part of the Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival!

JERRY LEE LEWIS: TROUBLE IN MIND screens June 2nd, 5th, and 8th. All screenings start at 5:30PM.

About the film:

In 1957, Jerry Lee Lewis topped the U.S. Country and R&B charts simultaneously with the self-consciously risqué rockabilly romp “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.” The track’s driving, boogie-woogie piano and sly, insinuating vocals represent a rich, blistering, and then-unprecedented synthesis. As a child growing up in Louisiana, Lewis was enraptured by the gospel and blues music he’d heard made by African-American musicians in his community, and the influence stuck. In 1958, while Lewis was touring the United Kingdom, it was reported that he’d married his thirteen-year old cousin Myra Gale Brown, and also that he’d lied to the press about her age. In the ensuing uproar, the tour was cancelled, and so was Jerry Lee, at least as an international headliner; unbowed and unapologetic, he reinvented himself as a hard-driving road warrior, playing three hundred shows a year in small clubs.

The complications of a life lived on one’s own terms are at the heart of TROUBLE IN MIND. For his first non-fiction feature, Coen and his co-editor Tricia Cooke—the filmmaker’s wife and a key collaborator on several Coen classics, including the Oscar-winning FARGO—employ a found-footage approach, eschewing talking-head documentary conventions. In the process, the film also forestalls easy judgments on a man whose lurid reputation preceded him for over half a century and will forever remain inextricable from his creative legacy.