Downloading can't compete with charms of record store

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Handout photo A band peforms an in-store concert at Sound It Out.

This documentary portrait of the very last surviving vinyl record shop in Teesside, England, serves as a nice cinematic bookend to the Canadian doc Vinyl, Alan Zweig's portrait of the lonely passion of record collecting.

Doc director Jeanie Finlay, herself a product of the film's Stockton-on-Tees setting, offers a more consoling perspective. Here, the act of running one of the last record shops is presented as a heroic pursuit. In the age of the anonymous digital download, the store is a social centre, obliging its customers to go out into the world to hook up with the music they love.

Sount It Out owner Tom Butchart doesn't look like a movie hero, mind you. He looks a lot like a hipster entrepreneur with a sardonic sense of humour and nicotine stains on his fingers.

But cool runs deep in this guy (a high school pal of the director), as we see when we observe him dealing with his diverse client base, including:

-- Two wannabe dance music DJs who operate an Internet radio station out of a shed.

-- A pair of metalheads, one of whom shares the startling confession that the record store, and the music it sells, is the only thing that keeps him from suicide.

-- A solitary Status Quo fan named Shane, ostracized from an early age because of his cerebral palsy, but seemingly at peace with his life, devoted to his music library.

Finlay's low-key directing style -- she spends much time filming in the store with her handheld camera -- allows her to capture the everyday encounters of music lovers and store staff with authentic vérité spontaneity. Witness a cheeky middle-aged man come into the store intent on buying the Dire Straits tune Sultans of Swing and actually engage in flirtation with the woman behind the camera.

You can't get much more integrated into your surroundings than that.

Crowd-funded by some 315 online investors, the film is ultimately upbeat. The store survives and apparently thrives in a place where all businesses, not just record stores, are closing. (At the time the film was made, independent record stores in Britain were closing at the rate of one every three days.)

But there is the touch of eulogy about it too. As with the vanishing video store, the record store offers a sense of community that is denied in the online entertainment options.

The notion of the hyper-knowledgeable Tom Butchart without a record store is as poignant as a preacher without a flock. In fact, the two things may be very much the same.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Other voices

Selected excerpts from reviews of Sound it Out:

Finlay's smartly assembled film is an affectionate portrait of a shrinking group of record collectors under technological siege.

-- Daniel Gold, New York Times

It's a delightful, real-life version of Nick Hornby's novel High Fidelity, a song of love, sadness and mortality with everyone involved doing it their way as they face the vinyl curtain.

-- Phillip French, Observer

A cheap and cheerful documentary about a properly endangered species: the record shop.

-- Andrew Pulver, Guardian

Proof that, in the right hands, documentaries boast as much heart as any feature. This one got soul too. Wonderful.

-- Ian Nathan, Empire magazine

Sound It Out isn't just good, it's important, as a chronicle of everything we lose when the music industry decamps to the Internet.

-- Matt Singer, IFC.com

For a seemingly naive film, it is amazing how well it works.

-- Derek Malcolm, This Is London

Finlay takes a gentle approach with her subjects, letting their passion -- and hers -- guide the doc.

-- Linda Barnard, Toronto Star

Finlay's handheld style is as casually intimate as her subjects, and the film stirringly posits music as a path to communal bliss.

-- Nick Schager, Village Voice

-- Compiled by Shane Minkin

Movie review

Sound It Out

Directed by Jeanie Findlay

Cinematheque

G

78 minutes

three and a half out of five stars

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 15, 2012 D5