Jason Molina grew up in Lorain, Ohio — a steel town on the slide, where the mills had gone dark and the American dream was something you watched decompose. His childhood friend Tommy Nickoloff, who directed this new documentary, puts it plainly: it was a place where you were encouraged to leave. Molina left. He released almost 20 studio albums, primarily as Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Co, ranging from skeletal lo-fi tape recordings to full-band Americana. He died in 2013, at 39, of organ failure brought on by alcoholism. The film is structured as an act of recovery — not rehabilitation, exactly, but illumination. Nickoloff and his collaborators are trying to close the gap between what Molina made and how little attention it received. A 2006 Cleveland show drew 70 people. The irony is thick: the Phoebe Bridgers and Katie Crutchfields of the world now claim him as an ancestor, and his posthumous fan base keeps expanding, but the recognition arrived after the man it was meant for. The Molina that emerges here is genuinely unusual — not in the hagiographic sense, but structurally. A voracious, omnivorous reader as a child (instruction manuals, foreign-language poetry), a teenage metalhead, a college kid so feverishly enthusiastic he was nicknamed Sparky and known to play impromptu 5am rooftop shows to debut new material. 'He's like a 20-sided die in Dungeons and Dragons,' says Nickoloff. 'Most people are lucky if they have six sides.' His producer collaborator Steve Albini put it differently: 'He was a big bullshitter.' Both observations are probably accurate and not mutually exclusive. The creative peak documented here is the 2003 album The Magnolia Electric Co — produced by Albini, built around Mike Brenner's shimmering lap steel, and recorded with a full band after years of sparer work. Brenner calls it 'a quantum leap.' Swanson at Secretly Canadian says the songs 'stepped up by a full magnitude of order.' Scout Niblett, who was in the studio, calls it 'the most otherworldly experience I've ever had.' The documentary does its best work here — tracing how a lo-fi basement aesthetic, shaped by Lorain's particular Midwestern grief, metabolized into something that sounded, in Swanson's word, 'timeless.' But the documentary is also honest about the ways Molina worked against himself. He changed the band name mid-career — confusingly, the album The Magnolia Electric Co became the name of the subsequent band — and had a habit of touring without playing anything from his most recent record, debuting unreleased material instead. He gave away show guarantees to hungry strangers. He stopped releasing music in 2009. The final four years were, by his family's account in the film, 'pure chaos.' The film doesn't quite crack the alcoholism — by its own admission, Molina kept it hidden long enough that the people closest to him were blindsided. What it does well is the before: the specific texture of a working-class Midwestern upbringing, the way rust belt landscapes became recurring psychic material in the songs, the cult infrastructure of Secretly Canadian and a small loyal community that kept the work alive. And it does right by the music itself, which is rarer than it sounds in rock documentaries. The legacy question the film poses — why do so few people know this work? — is one it can't fully answer, and maybe doesn't need to. Nickoloff says making it saved his life; Greg Freeman says hearing the music was a click-moment; Phoebe Bridgers and MJ Lenderman and Waxahatchee have carried the influence forward without diluting it. The work found the people it needed to find, eventually. The documentary is a door for the rest.
