"This world is made for everybody.... I'm looking to see that the young race of people combine together, black and white. If you got a little, you and me is together. We're gonna be one nation of people." Respect.
Mance Liscomb, a portrait of a man at 75 years, abandoned by his father when he was 11 for another woman; raised 23 kids and got the nickname "Daddy Mance" (a lot of them from his sister who died); worked the farm his whole life for not much money, like 50 to 75 cents a day at times (but he was always happy and healthy); had a wife who he loved and she loved him (but no bs tolerated); and always, beautifully, played the blues as true and soulful like he lived it and found his fame in his 60s thanks to the "young people."
What a man. He's like RL Burnside without the, you know, killing. This is the kind of pure cinema where you have "Night time is the right time" playing over shots of the purple and blue night sky and it feels like rhis is exactly what the medium of celluloid was made for. It could be longer, with more detail about how he got a record contract and so on, but why mess with something that is so immersive into the world and deep philosophy (and food) of Mance such as this? You even get a baptism! Last but not least, you know someone has lived an unapologetic, hard and (as the title suggests) "well-spent" kind of life when a man like Mance Liscomb can take a whole giant mass of watermelon with the seeds in his mouth no problem. Damn, man.
