Genre Documentary

American Folk (2017)

Item: American Folk
Rating: 3.0
Author: Ross McLaren

★★★ — American Folk (2017)

There's a moment in American Folk where two strangers, stuck sharing a long drive across America in the strange, suspended quiet after 9/11, pull over and just play. No audience, no agenda, just two people and their guitars and a fire, making something beautiful because what else are you supposed to do when the world has gone incomprehensible. It's the kind of scene that reminds you why music exists. And honestly, it's the kind of scene that makes this film worth your time, even when the film around it is making questionable decisions.

Joe Purdy and Amber Rubarth are both exceptional singer-songwriters, and if you're already a fan of either of them, you're probably going to love this. What's surprising, genuinely surprising, is how naturally they translate that same emotional honesty into acting. These are first-time leads carrying a feature film, and they do it with a quiet grace that a lot of seasoned actors would struggle to pull off. Their chemistry feels real rather than performed. The conversations between them are understated in the best possible way, like you're eavesdropping rather than watching a script unfold. There's real tenderness there, and real awkwardness too, which is exactly right for two people who are strangers figuring each other out across state lines and roadside diners.

The acoustic soundtrack woven through the whole thing is, without question, the film's greatest strength. Haunting and warm in equal measure, it captures grief and uncertainty and that particular fragility of a connection that hasn't yet decided what it wants to be. If you put the soundtrack on without watching the film, you'd still feel something. That's not nothing.

The film has a documentary-like rhythm to it, unhurried, almost drifting, and for the most part that works. Long stretches of road. Small-town stops. Campfire songs that feel spontaneous and unpolished in a way that suits the whole thing beautifully. You can sense it comes from a place of genuine feeling rather than formula. That much is clear throughout.

But here's where I have to be honest about its problems, because they're real ones. The 9/11 framing, the reason these two strangers are sharing a car in the first place, the closed airspace, the grounded flights, it's presented as a meaningful backdrop, but the film never fully commits to exploring it. It's there, it's acknowledged, it shapes the mood. But it also means the story carries this enormous historical weight without ever really engaging with it properly. The result is that the backdrop starts to feel more like a plot convenience than a genuine thematic anchor. And that's a shame, because the story underneath, two people finding unexpected connection on a road they didn't plan to take together, is universal enough to stand without it. I kept wishing the film would either go deeper into what 9/11 actually meant to these characters, or let it go entirely and just trust the journey.

It never quite makes up its mind whether it's a film about national grief or a simple, beautiful story about two people. That uncertainty costs it something. It's a bit like Beautiful Boy (2018) in that sense, a film with real emotional authenticity at its centre that sometimes gets in its own way by insisting on a frame that doesn't quite fit the story it's actually telling.

What I keep coming back to, though, is those songs. And those performances. And the quiet, lived-in feeling of two people slowly lowering their defences across hundreds of miles of American road. American Folk isn't a great film, but it is a moving experience, particularly if folk music means something to you and you're in the right mood for something slow and gentle and a little melancholy. I just wish it had trusted itself to be exactly that, without needing a national tragedy to justify the journey it was already perfectly capable of taking.

Three stars.

Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2017 | Watched: 2025-10-08

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