Neil Young
The Man in the Black Hat
Overview
A loud poem. A whimsical western tale of music and love.
Cast
12 people
Reviews
5 min readA Loud Poem in a Quiet World
I didn’t know what to expect when I pressed play on Paradox. The synopsis called it a "whimsical western tale of music and love," which sounded like a recipe for either enchantment or disaster. The director was Daryl Hannah—yes, that Daryl Hannah, the one who once fought a replicant in Blade Runner and now, apparently, was making surreal musical fantasies with Neil Young.
The cast list read like a family reunion at a folk festival: Neil Young, his son Ben, Lukas and Micah Nelson (sons of Willie), and a handful of musicians whose names I didn’t recognize but whose faces looked like they’d been plucked from a 1970s Laurel Canyon commune. The runtime was a lean 73 minutes. The TMDB score was a baffling 3.8/10.
And the tagline? Nonexistent.
So, what is Paradox? It’s not a movie in any conventional sense. It’s a mood, a vibe, a loose collection of images and sounds that feel like they were captured in a single, sun-drenched afternoon where no one bothered to check if the camera was rolling.
There’s a plot, sort of—a group of outlaws, led by a grizzled Neil Young (playing a character named "The Man in the Black Hat"), stumble upon a mysterious box that may or may not contain a fortune or a curse. But the plot is beside the point. The point is the way the light hits the dust, the way the characters move like they’re half-asleep, the way the music doesn’t so much score the film as exist alongside it, like a parallel universe bleeding into this one.
The first thing you notice is the sound. Or, more accurately, the lack of it. Paradox is a film that breathes in silence. Dialogue is sparse, often muttered or sung rather than spoken.
When characters do talk, it’s in riddles or half-finished thoughts, as if they’re not entirely sure what they’re saying—or if they’re even awake. The music, when it arrives, feels like a relief, a sudden burst of color in a world that’s otherwise muted. Neil Young’s guitar work is as jagged and unpredictable as ever, but here it’s paired with Lukas Nelson’s smoother, more melodic playing, creating a push-and-pull that mirrors the film’s own tension between chaos and calm.
Full Plot (Spoilers)
Spoiler warning
This section contains the full plot, including major story reveals. Overview above stays spoiler-free.
Buzz & Rumors
Public reportsThe western they made between soundchecks
Daryl Hannah liked the phrase spitball production. Neil Young and Promise of the Real were on her Colorado ranch in September 2016, sitting high so they could breathe for a Telluride date and then Desert Trip. She knew they would end up at a campfire with jokes and songs. She told the Austin American-Statesman she did not want a documentary of that. She wanted a little movie. The script for the short was 10 pages. The characters started improvising. latestnetflix.com's read is that Three days later she had a 73-minute western that Netflix bought a week before SXSW.
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Hannah wrote and directed. Deadline printed her own origin story. "Paradox sprung up spontaneously and unexpectedly, like a peculiar dandelion, popping up between the cracks in the pavement." The logline called it a fantasy, a loud poem, and a free-spirited tale of music and love. Young plays the Man in the Black Hat. Lukas Nelson is Jail Time. Micah Nelson is the Particle Kid. Willie Nelson turns up as Red. The band, the managers, the road crew, and the caretakers play cartoon versions of themselves. Hannah told the Globe and Mail they are how other people see them, more than how they are. Young was 72 and, in the film, a taciturn rider who robs seed banks. , ,
The Times reported Super 8 and Hannah's iPhone. She thrifted the costumes herself. Young said she did all the work. Hannah's own comparison was El Topo without the budget. Micah told the Statesman they even shot a beat at Luck, the Western town set from Red Headed Stranger, where he used to play as a kid and got stung by hornets. They jammed giant skin drums for a day to score footage that had no plot yet. Concert scraps from Telluride and Desert Trip sit next to guitar in the woods. The soundtrack, Young plus Promise of the Real, dropped on Reprise the same day the film hit Netflix. , ,
SXSW got the premiere. The reviews got the knife.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uecHqZx_wrs
Netflix took global rights on 7 March 2018 and set a worldwide date of 23 March, with a limited theatrical around it. The SXSW bow was 15 March. TMDB still files the film as music and fantasy, 1 hour 13 minutes, NR. The official trailer leans Leone. A Nelson says the man in the black hat can be kind of shady. Then Young's eyes under the brim. Somebody appears to float away. , , ,
Rotten Tomatoes sits at 29 percent from seven reviews. Metacritic logged 31 from four. Peter Sobczynski at RogerEbert.com gave it 1.5 out of 4 and called it a glorified home movie without the glory. Variety's Joe Leydon called it a waste of time made bearable only by its brevity. The Guardian's Monica Castillo, writing from SXSW, found a rambling future where men prospect for old technology and women harvest food off-screen until a full moon unites them. She clocked the GMO-seed activism that never gets explained, and a Mexican sidekick who arrives in serape and sombrero. She hoped the debut was a warm-up. , ,
Hannah told the Statesman she still wanted to make a real film by traditional norms, and that she would keep making spitball work because it is liberating to make art without asking permission. Netflix asked. Netflix paid. The dandelion is still in the catalog, 73 minutes of tour family in cowboy hats, waiting for the moon. ,
Entertainment rumors and trivia aggregated from public reporting. Treat speculation as unverified unless a cited source confirms it.