Paul Kelly - Stories of Me

Paul Kelly - Stories of Me is a feature documentary directed by Ian Darling about the Australian singer-songwriter Paul Kelly, tracing nearly forty years of his life and music through interviews, archive and performance. It is studied in the HSC English EAL/D Common Module: Texts and Human Experiences.

Paul Kelly is, by wide agreement, one of Australia's greatest singer-songwriters, and Stories of Me traces a life and career spanning nearly forty years - from his childhood in Adelaide as the sixth of nine children, through hard, obscure years as a young musician in the pubs of Melbourne and Sydney, to a body of songs a large part of the country knows by heart. That national familiarity is the film's problem and its subject: audiences arrive feeling they already know the man, and the film sets out to test that feeling.

Director Ian Darling came to Kelly as a lifelong fan and says so plainly - the film never pretends to neutrality. Working from over fifty interviews, hundreds of hours of concert and rehearsal footage, years of archive and a canon of more than 350 songs, Darling and editor Sally Fryer built the film not as a chronology but as a mosaic, cutting songs against the life so the music is always explaining the man and the man is always deepening the music. Three streams are woven together: a performance stream of specially recorded shows; an interview stream of about fifty voices, including Richard Flanagan, Rachel Perkins and Archie Roach, who narrate the man from the outside because Kelly himself rarely speaks to camera; and an archive stream reaching back to rare 16mm footage of a twenty-something Kelly, over which the film lays his handwritten lyric sheets.

Rather than march through years, the film moves through songs - "Leaps and Bounds" into a Melbourne boyhood, "How to Make Gravy" into family and absence, "Deeper Water" into the whole arc of a life - and it ends not on a verdict but on the director's admission that "the truth is always elusive". Its real subject is not just one musician but the act of narrating a human life.

The film's governing idea is that a life is not a straight line but a thing remembered in fragments, and its non-chronological structure enacts this directly, "repeatedly returning to the boy to inform the nature of the man". "Leaps and Bounds", with its refrain "I remember / I remember" swelling at last into "I remember everything", becomes the film's own motto: the past is not narrated so much as re-entered.

At its core is a paradox about a famous confessor: Kelly seems to tell us everything in his songs yet withholds himself in person. The film's answer is to treat the songs as the truest self-representation available, laying his handwritten lyric sheets, "with their inherent mistakes and alterations", over performance footage so the finished song becomes a working draft and the self is shown to be made, not found. Darling admits the discovery drove the whole project: "so much of Paul... had already been explained to me in his songs."

The film is also a study of how an individual becomes common property. Its chorus of interviewees, shot portrait-style with "no flowers or lamps", assembles a private man from outside testimony, and "From St Kilda to Kings Cross" makes the pattern audible: an intensely private ache - "I'd give you all of Sydney Harbour" - has become a line a whole country sings as its own. The title song names the cost: a man wakes to "listen bitterly / To stories of me", identity done to a person by others.

Beneath the music runs loss. "How to Make Gravy", a letter from a man in prison who will miss Christmas, pours enormous grief into the smallest domestic detail - "Who's gonna make the gravy now? / I bet it won't taste the same" - and the plain apology "Tell 'em all I'm sorry, I screwed up this time" carries a whole life of regret in one line. The film's editing mirrors the song's method, holding big emotion inside ordinary things.

Finally, the film is honest about contradiction and about its own limits. "Dumb Things" lets Kelly own his failures without a redemption arc, "Deeper Water" figures a life as a "cork on the tide" carried rather than commanded, and Darling concedes he is "telling his story from our perspective only", closing on the shrug that "some questions are best left unanswered". It is a documentary that succeeds by admitting it cannot fully succeed.