Editor’s note: Love Shines screens at the SXSW Film Festival, March 15 at 6:15pm (Alamo Ritz 2) and March 16 at 7pm (Vimeo Theater).

“You’ve got to be able to bring the rocks back from the moon or nobody knows that you were there.” Steve Earle’s pronouncement provides something like a rationale for Love Shines. Tracking Ron Sexsmith’s effort to make a record that will, as he puts it, “break through in some way,” the documentary offers testimonies to his genius, his integrity, and the awe he inspires in fellow artists. It also offers a series of reflections on why he’s remained mostly unknown, even though he’s already made 11 (or 10, depending on who’s counting) records.

As Love Shines begins, Sexsmith has initiated a different tack, by hiring “legendary producer” Bob Rock to work on the new CD, eventually released as Long Player Late Bloomer. As Sexsmith’s wife Colleen Hixenbaugh puts it, the decision is risky. “When the mention of working with Bob Rock came into his life,” she says, “I was kind of a little ill at ease.” While she understands Rock’s importance and especially, his success with other acts like Metallica, Mötley Crüe, and Bon Jovi, she also worries about money. Married to a perennially struggling artist and a musician herself (currently collaborating with Paul Linklater as Colleen and Paul), she’s visibly worried about yet another venture that might not pan out: “The bottom line,” she says, “is that it comes out of our pocket.” 

Still, Hixenbaugh, like everyone else interviewed in the film, believes in the cause. His friends and colleagues repeatedly characterize Sexsmith’s songwriting as singular. “Not a lot of people have the gift that Ron has,” says Daniel Lanois. “He sees a tiny snapshot of a feeling and then he takes that snapshot and expands upon it a develop a song.” Steve Earle adds. “There are only a handful of songwriters who come up with fairly original melodies, and I mean fairly original melodies. But Ron has melody after melody after melody, and it makes me jealous, absolutely.” Feist witnesses as well: “He breaks your heart with his reality, and he does it with a song.”

Again and again, Sexsmith’s admirers extol his brilliance. And again and again, they hope he’ll be able to succeed and also, at long last, get over his lack of confidence. It may be as simple as structure and production: as Tony Ferguson puts it, “Three minutes and 30 seconds is all that keeps Ron from being a major talent.” Or it may be a more profound set of issues. Earle, who knows something about industry success, admires the earnestness and honesty of his friend’s work, in which he is “actually feeling a feeling through to its end.” But, Earle goes on, even if “melancholy and despair are both components of his music… You can’t stay there. We’re not constructed to stay there. Melancholy can be befriended, it can be tamed, it can be harnessed.”

Douglas Arrowsmith’s film gestures toward some of the sources of Sexsmith’s melancholy, following him on a cursory tour of his childhood home on Galbraith street in St. Catharines, Ontario—or more precisely, a walk in the driveway of that home and a look up at his bedroom window. Old snapshots offer glimpses of Sexsmith as a boy, dressed for Halloween, riding in a toy car. “My dad wasn’t really in the picture,” he says, as you see a single picture of dad, lean and smiling with his family. A truck driver who spent little time at home, he left behind a collection of records that Sexsmith absorbed and eventually emulated. “My relationship with my dad,” he sums up, “Was the 45s.”

It’s an intriguing notion, and then it’s gone. The film is not, in fact, an examination of Sexsmith’s psyche, his childhood or his “melancholy.” It is instead an appreciation and observation of his process, shifting slightly with Rock. As such, it’s less informative than a little melancholy itself, less about details than impressions and allusions.

“I don’t think I ever did well in school,” muses Sexsmith, suggesting that he was most often bored and distracted. When he was placed into “an older creative writing class,” he believes the aim was to encourage him to write down his thoughts, “to see what I was spacing out about. I was always off in space, you know, like a lot of kids, I was always looking out the window.” A photo indicates as much, as other interviewees look for other references. York University’s Rob Bowman sees Sexsmith as part of a “great Canadian tradition,” alongside Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, and Joni Mitchell. Elvis Costello, with whom Sexsmith has toured, considers him “slightly cursed with being born out of time… The quality and nuance of his songs would have been greatly appreciated and are appreciated by people like myself, people who grew up with Tim Hardin and Paul McCartney.” 

Costello underscores this last comparison, saying that Sexsmith “has access to one of the purest seams of melody that he has access to exclusively, since Paul McCartney.” Aware that this “sounds like a pretty big thing to say” Costello insists, “I actually think it’s true.” The film tends to let such assessments stand, backed by just a few studio sessions (which imply that Sexsmith is thrilled and even surprised by the changes Rock suggests) and a couple of live performances, typically intercut or overlaid with comments, either by Sexsmith or someone else.

The film’s time structure is similarly fractured, not a bad thing in a story about a career proceeding by small steps, and in occasional fits and starts. When Sexsmith meets with Kiefer Sutherland, the documentary is cutting back in time, to 2006, when Sutherland’s Ironworks Music released Sexsmith’s Time Being. And when he appears at the Apollo with Costello and Sheryl Crow (as part of the Sundance Channel series, Spectacle: Elvis Costello With…), it’s 2009, and Crow’s face, as she listens to “All in Good Time,” reflects exactly the sort of pleasure and admiration Love Shines encourages throughout.

Earle feels this pleasure, but also understands the business. “I watched John Van Zandt, arguably his own worst enemy in the world. The best songwriter in the world, and a lot of people believed that, and it still never translated into record sales.” Released on 1 March 2011, Long Player Late Bloomer was eventually deemed unmarketably in-between: Warner Bros turned it down and an indie label thought it too “Mainstream. As Sexsmith walks through an amusement park at night, Ferris wheel lights arranged just behind his figure, the film makes clear he’s walking a road all his own. Or not. As Earle observes, “I think Ron sometimes underestimates how lucky he is that anybody knows who he is. It may be unjust, but it’s not unprecedented.”