In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon review – heartfelt portrait of a generational talent

Alex Gibney’s docu-celebration of Paul Simon unfolds over an epic three-and-a-half hours, but he persuades you that this is exactly how much time was needed. There is something very involving and very personal here: something to do with the slight, pure line of Simon’s unmistakable vocal presence, vulnerable and even fragile, perhaps, but also insistent and durable. Simon is of course the genius songwriter from New York whose speaking voice, to my ear, sounds increasingly like that of Woody Allen. Gibney’s camera joins Simon – a grandfatherly but spry figure – as he works on his latest choral album Seven Psalms, then flashes back to his earliest years with Art Garfunkel, and brings us up to the present.

Simon says the sensational harmonies of his double-act with Garfunkel were originally inspired by the Everly Brothers, and once that comparison is made it’s impossible to unhear it. Back in the day they were folk-rock million-sellers: goofy and real and relatably uncool. Two scarf-wearing college kids with different types of terrible hair who uniquely plugged themselves into the yearning 60s zeitgeist via their work on Mike Nichols’ The Graduate, in which Dustin Hoffman’s bewilderment and ennui were superbly conveyed like a soundtrack coming from inside his character’s head. Simon’s songs, such as The Sound of Silence and Mrs Robinson, were eerily plaintive and compelling; they were often composed at a moment’s notice, virtually improvised, and spoke to middle America’s countercultural and generational alienation.

The pair’s last album together, Bridge Over Troubled Water, was the all-timer whose pressures finally broke their partnership and 17-year friendship as Garfunkel, the better singer but not a composer, tried to make it in the movies. The giant open-air reunion concert in New York in 1981 was a huge success, but could not provide a long-term solution for their personal antagonism; Gibney’s film suggests that Simon was nettled that Garfunkel made no attempt to protect him on the night from a crazy fan who jumped threateningly on to the stage and was bundled off by someone else (this was a year after the John Lennon murder).

The second half of the film (ushered in after an hour and a half) is about Simon’s fascinating and unique solo career. There is, however, nothing about his relationship with Shelley Duvall, and only a little about his short-lived marriage to Carrie Fisher (eventually, he found happiness with singer Edie Brickell). Simon stayed in the public eye in the most startling way: he was a virtual mainstay of TV’s Saturday Night Live, during which period his comb-over really did make him look like an accountant. (Poignantly, he says that at this point in his life, people literally didn’t know who he was before he began to sing.) In the 80s, his hair settled down, perhaps with surgical assistance.

Then in 1986 he found his moment of contested inspiration. Simon’s love of South African music led him to seek out the artists themselves, whose work he curated on the smash hit album Graceland. Perhaps hurtfully, Simon was not invited to perform at Live Aid (though he did sing on the American single We Are the World). Yet this was his globalist moment. Did he realise that he was going to get into trouble for breaking the anti-apartheid boycott and being supposedly guilty of condescension and white-saviourism?

What comes across from this film is that Graceland was an act of inspirational geopolitical innocence, born of amazing imagination and creative entrepreneurialism. Simon was utterly unconcerned by “culture war” objections and probably didn’t even think about them until well after the event. He brought South African music out of isolation at exactly the right moment; he didn’t musicwash apartheid, he found a way of mediating African music into the mainstream, with utter sincerity and commitment. It’s a rich and heartfelt portrait.

• In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon is in UK and Irish cinemas on 13 October for one night, and on digital platforms and Blu-ray from 28 October.