Roll Out, Cowboy

“It just says, ‘Avoid contact with eyes.'” Cindy, of the film crew, reads from the bug spray label. Nearby, Jonah Carpenter yells, “Fuck!” His eyes have just been sprayed.

The minor ruckus is one of several recorded for Roll Out, Cowboy, the story of a year or so in the life of Chris Sand, a.k.a. Sandman the Rapping Cowboy. He’s on the road with his opening act, the Mustaches, a hiphop-inflected musical-comedy duo comprised of Jonah and Shawn Parke. The boys have been fooling around on the road from Missouri to Iowa, and Chris has sprayed Jonah’s face, by accident. Following, Chris is apologetic and, Shawn reports, “Jonah’s really pissed off at you. You may have shot the rest of this tour down the drain.” As the trio heads off, Chris sighs, “He was laughing at first, but now I think it’s starting to go down, the poison.”

By the time they get to Des Moines, this episode appears to be done with, but still, the guys are feeling “tension.” As much as Shawn and Jonah admire Chris, they’re also well aware that working with him isn’t easy (“Like the fact,” notes Shawn, “That you don’t get to wash every day”). Roll Out, Cowboy makes this much clear, at least.

Elizabeth Lawrence’s documentary is less clear about other things, and this is to its credit. The film — which is premiering at Chicago’s Facets Cinematheque on 22 July, followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker and Sand, as well as a live performance — does provide some usual tour-movie scenes — the stage show with audience reaction shots, the road montage with a map, the boys fooling around backstage moment, the interviews with bemused family members. But it also deconstructs that formula, framing the tour footage with less familiar images. These include illustrations of Sand’s life off-stage, back in Dunn Center, North Dakota, population 122, as well as some confessional camera moments (in need of money, Sand takes his truckers license exam, complaining each early morning about the “trucker’s life”). In another sort of punctuation, Sand and other interviewees contemplate art and music and politics, some observations wise, others silly, and still others in process.

Some of these contemplations are Chris’ own. As he begins the film, he’s introducing a bus he means to take on the road. It’s filthy and frankly ancient, unlikely to make the trip. It used to belong to his dad, says Chris, and yes, “It’s seen better days.” “What’s the mileage?” asks Lawrence from off-screen. “I think it’s around eight,” he says. “Maybe 11.” He offers a tour of the teeny bed area in the back, “where the leopard skin throw goes.” It’s a fantasy, yes, with an ironic awareness of itself as such. Sandman must go forth: “This is my gift,” he smiles, “I was put here to drift and to blow my harp and sing.”

More specifically, he was put here to sing and to rap. As Chris Sand describes his combination of interested, “I need the country songs to kind of reminisce about the loss of culture and youth and to feel sad. And rap’s a good vessel for feeling my oats you know, feeling strong and feeling powerful and sexy.” Again, his description seems doubled, partly sincere and partly self-mocking. He acts out these various roles on the road, performing for scant audiences as well as full houses, and in at least one instance, emptying a room in Cincinnati. Asked, “What happened in Cincinnati?” he explains that when he sang “Gateway Bar,” with lyrics including the words “gay” and “lesbian,” his audience “walked out.” A next scene is an interview with his lesbian aunt, who admires his openness and “gentle heart.”

At the same time, Chris is wholly capable of typical boy-on-the-road behavior, as a montage of interviews with ex-girlfriends attests. One describes his “certain sex appeal,” another says his act is misogynist (she remembers a song about “climbing up on some girl and going downtown”) and then says he’s her favorite ex-boyfriend. He does seem charming, and when he brings the film crew along with him to a girl’s home, where he smiles patiently as she introduces him to her pet, Stephanie the Starling (“Birds aren’t as gross as everyone makes them out to be,” she asserts).

Sand’s gentle heart is also politically inclined, as he makes clear in his pronouncements of support for Barack Obama (much of the film is shot during the 2008 election season). As Hillary Clinton or Obama appear on background television, Sand positions himself as a “healing bridge between those two worlds” of red and blue states. His performative combinations speak to that, in his cowboy songs and his raps, as do his efforts to tell stories that appeal to a range of listeners, coming from multiple backgrounds. “I’m not the first to do it,” he says, comparing himself to Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams or Janis Joplin. “There’s an alchemic creation that happens,” says Sand, “And what comes out of it is the American experience.”

At the same time, he notes the distinction between his off-stage and on-stage selves. “The difference between Chris Sand and Sandman the Rapping Cowboy,” he says, “is the difference between Clarke Kent and Superman, I guess.” Both are performances, both are attempts to communicate, and both have stories to tell. Roll Out, Cowboy shows both, and doesn’t quite define either.