'Love' in: J.T. Van Zandt, director Margaret Brown and Chloe Sevigny at the premiere party for Brown's Be Here to Love Me Photo: (STV)

The Reeler made a Friday night pit stop at Houston Street's Parkside Lounge, where Palm Pictures hosted an opening-night party celebrating Margaret Brown's documentary Be Here to Love Me. The film chronicles the life and work of the late singer/songwriter Townes Van Zandt, with Friday's event following a sold-out screening at the Angelika and a Q&A with Brown and Van Zandt's son J.T.

I am on the record as liking the film quite a bit, and from what I hear, the reaction at the Angelika Friday night was not too dissimilar. However, I did not expect to a find much more accurate gauge of the doc's veracity than young Van Zandt himself--tall, relaxed, the spitting image of his dad and admittedly his legacy's most careful guardian.

OK, so how did Brown do?

"I got a feeling that it was true," he told me, adding that he appreciated Brown's objective portrait of Townes Van Zandt's turbulent, troubled fatherhood. "When you're dealing with the past, there's a lot of 'should have done this, should have done that.' I would just say that the catalogue gives me more fatherly advice throughout time. Townes did exactly what he had to do, and I wouldn't judge him for that. His lifestyle and stuff--of course its interesting if you're interested in the guy as an artist. But if you're really a fan, and you dig him, you can turn to the catalogue and that will help you from having to make those judgments."

I later caught up with Brown between her chats with a leather-capped Chloe Sevigny and The Reeler's favorite Brooklyn indie, Jem Cohen. "When Jem saw my movie in Rotterdam, he came out and he patted me on the head," Brown said.

"But it was a genuine pat on the head," Cohen replied.

The head-patting evidently has a history, going back to the days during which Brown worked as Cohen's intern while studying film at New York University.

"He was a really good intern boss," Brown said, "because he took me to all these little places around New York that were really beautiful, and I could see them in different ways."

"And we'd stand around," Cohen said.

"And then we'd stand around even more."

Yes, I told Brown, I've been to work with Jem. I know the drill.

"I learned from the master," she said. But while Be Here to Love Me's languid Southern inertia is part of its charm, the film draws its true power from documenting Van Zandt's surrender to music. I asked Cohen--an uncompromising filmmaker whose Benjamin Smoke chronicled another musical anti-hero of sorts--about capturing that surrender in all its vulnerability as well as volatility.

"There are some movies about musicians that actually listen to their music," Cohen said. "Some don't. It's a listening movie. You know, Benjamin was a wreck. Townes Van Zandt was a wreck. But their music is more important than the wreckage, and the movies are very clear about that. There are a million movies about people who just rise up and crash down. That's the standard story."

And as J.T. Van Zandt said, his father's story--part wanderer, part genius--has virtually no parallel in American music outside Bob Dylan. "I think their timing is sort of out of control and impeccable," he told me. "It's kind of like everything they said so perfectly is (now) kind of a cliché. And living in Austin, the singer/songwriter thing is finally a popularity contest. Not to dog anyone's efforts, but you don't have a lot of people hopping boxcars anymore. Hearing traveling songs from college graduates is kind of annoying."

Right. Movies about traveling songs, on the other hand... now we are talking.