Kris Kristofferson’s Freedom

Hawke, who had directed Kristofferson in a small role in his Chelsea Walls (2001) and would do so again in the last film Kristofferson appeared in, Blaze (2018), packs a lot of stories—some juicy, some hilarious, some heartbreaking—into his profile, and he keeps circling back around to the aspect of Kristofferson’s character that made him such a unique songwriter and on-screen presence. Walter Chaw puts it this way in his appreciation for RogerEbert.com: “He has the same quality as an actor as he does as a singer. He isn’t polished. He’s not affected. He is absolutely only himself: the embodiment of the complexity and contradiction of the myth of the American man.”

Born in Brownsville, where Texas just about tips over into Mexico, Kristofferson grew up in California, where he played rugby and football in high school and college, majored in literature, and got a couple of essays published in the Atlantic. He was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship and studied William Blake at Oxford, where he cut a few records that went nowhere and wrote two novels that never got published. Feeling pressure from his family—his father was an Air Force major general—Kristofferson joined the Army, learned how to fly helicopters, became a captain, and got assigned to teach English at West Point.

By this point, he had a wife and child and a career trajectory that was looking pretty solid. And he walked away. He went to Nashville to write songs and work as a janitor at a studio where he spotted but didn’t dare approach Bob Dylan. Ends were not meeting. His wife left him, and to cover child support, he flew helicopters in the Gulf of Mexico until his drinking got him fired. Then he flew one to Johnny Cash’s house and landed in his yard, where he handed off a couple of demos.

Cash recorded “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” a haunting drinker’s lament that shot to #1 on the Billboard country chart and won Song of the Year at the Country Music Association Awards in 1970. The dam broke. Sammi Smith had a hit with “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” and Kristofferson’s songs were suddenly being covered by Roger Miller, Jerry Lee Lewis, Waylon Jennings, and Gladys Knight & the Pips. Kristofferson met Janis Joplin in an elevator, and he told Hawke that “we were both naked in about fifteen minutes.”

He didn’t know that she had recorded “Me and Bobby McGee” until just before the single was released after she overdosed and died in October 1970. The single hit the top of the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed there for weeks, becoming an anthem for the era. “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose” does have a Whitmanesque lankiness to it, and for the Atlantic’s Spencer Kornhaber, “Me and Bobby McGee” has “one of the most memorable refrains in the twentieth-century American songbook.”

“You can look at Nashville, pre-Kris and post-Kris,” Bob Dylan once said. “Because he changed everything.” Kristofferson had “evolved into something of a communal conscience for the town, and the country music business, while also helping to usher it into conversation with the rest of popular music,” writes Jon Caramanica in the New York Times. Country singer and songwriter Steve Earle has remarked that Kristofferson “was what I wanted to be when I grew up: a hyper-literate hillbilly.”

Kristofferson’s movie career began when Dennis Hopper asked for a few songs for The Last Movie (1971), and when Kristofferson went down to Peru to watch the shoot, Hopper gave him a small role—Minstrel Wrangler—because he looked great on a horse. In Bill L. Norton’s Cisco Pike (1972), Kristofferson is a musician blackmailed by a corrupt cop (Gene Hackman).

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) is not only “one of cinema’s towering westerns,” writes novelist Steve Erickson, it’s also Sam Peckinpah’s “greatest movie, an examination of how American power and greed corrode the stuff of freedom and friendship.” With “more star power than acting chops, Kristofferson is startlingly charismatic considering that movies weren’t his day job,” writes Erickson. “Whether you insist on viewing Kristofferson’s Kid as a lone hero or a betrayed victim, the movie now and then reminds you that there is about him a bit of the amiable sociopath, shooting people in the back and dueling at ten paces only to cheat at two, waiting just long enough with gun drawn so his opponent’s final, fleeting realization will be what a sucker he has been.”

Kristofferson appeared briefly as a nasty biker in Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), and he played a truck driver in Peckinpah’s Convoy (1978), “in which he, the director, and costar Ali McGraw subjected themselves to the indignity of making a film based on a Top 40 novelty hit celebrating the CB radio craze,” writes Glenn Kenny at the Decider. “The messy results are a goofy testament to how seriously any of the participants took it.”

Martin Scorsese told Hawke that he cast Kristofferson as a divorced rancher who falls for Ellen Burstyn’s waitress and aspiring singer in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) because “he just embodied the feeling of that moment in time . . . It wasn’t just the way he looked—it was the way he moved, his voice. His presence allowed the audience inside the picture.” Last year, Burstyn told Isaac Butler that Kristofferson had a major hand in shaping the film’s ending when the team was stumped. With an improvised line—“Come on, I’ll take you to Monterey. I don’t give a damn about that ranch”—Kristofferson resolved a standoff between Burstyn and a producer.

Frank Pierson’s A Star Is Born (1976), cowritten with John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion and costarring Barbra Streisand, made Kristofferson bigger in Hollywood than he ever had been—or would be again. The third of four tellings of the love story between a famous but self-destructive performer on his way down and an unknown talent on her way up—the other three are William A. Wellman’s in 1937 with Janet Gaynor and Fredric March, George Cukor’s in 1954 with Judy Garland and James Mason, and Bradley Cooper’s 2018 version starring Lady Gaga and himself—was a smash hit. And Kristofferson is “immediately electric in his character’s sozzled state,” writes Glenn Kenny.

Blamed for pulling the curtain down on the New Hollywood era, Heaven’s Gate (1980) is “a film whose sheer beauty, emotional power, and unconventional politics have been obfuscated for way too long by the story of its own making and catastrophic American opening,” wrote Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan in 2012, when a newly restored director’s cut prompted a major critical reassessment. At the time of its release, though, it was an albatross wringing the necks of everyone involved. Christopher Walken and Isabelle Huppert certainly rebounded, but Kristofferson, who plays a Wyoming marshal siding with homesteaders in their face-off with wealthy ranchers, and director Michael Cimino had a harder time of it.

Kristofferson as a financier in Alan J. Pakula’s political thriller Rollover (1981), costarring Jane Fonda, was a hard sell, but he went down easy opposite Willie Nelson in Alan Rudolph’s Songwriter (1984). Kristofferson and Rudolph teamed up again the following year for Trouble in Mind, which Dave Kehr, writing at the time for the Chicago Reader, called a “dense, beautifully executed, highly stylized romantic fantasy.”

After he became known to a new generation of music lovers as a staunch defender of Sinead O’Connor, but before young moviegoers first got to know him as a vampire hunter in the Blade movies, Kristofferson delivered a good handful of memorable performances. In Lone Star (1996), the first of three collaborations with John Sayles, he’s seen in flashbacks as Charlie Wade, a cruelly racist sheriff of a Texas border town that can’t be all that far up the Rio Grande from Brownsville.

Kristofferson here is “the romance of the American male reflected through the black prism of white nationalism, manifest destiny, and cultural genocide,” writes Walter Chaw. “Charlie Wade is the horror of America played by a man who is all the hope of it. I have read anecdotal tales of audiences screaming when America’s dad Henry Fonda appears as the rapist and pillager in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). I confess I thought those stories were exaggerated until I caught myself in an audible gasp when Kristofferson’s revealed as the monster in Sayles’s elegiac western.”

Playing a novelist modeled on James Jones (From Here to Eternity) in James Ivory’s A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries (1998), Kristofferson “delivers what may be his finest work ever as an actor,” wrote Hawke. His wife, Lisa Kristofferson, “tells me Kris had internalized that character so deeply that she was afraid when he went to the set for the final death scene that he might actually let his spirit leave his body and die. Scorsese notes that ‘his performance in that film is like that of an older Jimmy Stewart or Gary Cooper. There is truth when he speaks. You sense that he is genuine. He has that big, iconic American face—with the soul of a poet.’”

Hawke’s Blaze draws on the life of Blaze Foley, another outlaw country singer and songwriter who came up after Kristofferson and frequently toured and hung and drank with fellow Texan Townes Van Zandt. Blaze, starring Ben Dickey as Foley, is a “fuzzy but moving biopic,” wrote David Edelstein in New York. Its “best scene features Kris Kristofferson as Foley’s once-abusive, now near-senile father and Alynda Segarra as his sister, who escaped the old man’s malevolent influence by finding Jesus. Segarra and Dickey sing a sweet, sad duet, and something in Kristofferson’s eyes suggests he’s hearing it not just as the terrible father but as the singer-songwriter who knew Foley, Van Zandt, and so many others now gone and that he’s with them again. The magic in Blaze is when time stops.”