Phil Ochs: There but for Fortune

Phil Ochs in his first publicity shot (1963, New York City). "Phil Ochs: There but for Fortune", a film by Kenneth Bowser. A First Run Features release.

A folk singer–songwriter and activist of the ’60s, Ochs gets the conventional documentary treatment in this informative but lackluster portrait. The by-the-numbers approach charts Ochs’s life from his youth to his suicide in 1976. Talking-head interviews with family, friends, contemporaries and celebrity fans (including Tom Hayden, Joan Baez and Sean Penn) structure the narrative and provide some intimacy, but are less revealing than the too-few vintage clips of Ochs discussing his life and career. The film is also curiously stingy with clips of Ochs performing—the brief snippets hint at his talent instead of demonstrating it.

Ochs’s songwriting and professional career was integrally tied to his progressive politics (seen in his uncompromisingly pointed lyrics), and the film often privileges his activism over his life as a musician. Fascinating documentation of his anti–Vietnam War activities, participation in the 1968 DNC demonstration in Chicago and visit to Salvador Allende’s Chile provides rich examples of an artist truly living the message in his songs.

The film is strongest at its end, when it chronicles Ochs’s rapidly escalating alcoholism, manic depression and final mental breakdown that led to his suicide. Interviews, archival footage and musical performances are integrated to greater effect here than elsewhere. We see Ochs as a complicated artist and troubled individual, rather than as an almost rote countercultural icon, only when it’s too late—for him and for the film.