Culture
Film on influential songwriter Jason Molina to world premiere at Athens International Film + Video Festival
By: Emily Votaw
Posted on:
ATHENS, Ohio (WOUB) – Tommy Nickoloff is about to premiere his first film. He is 54 years old.
It took this long not because the opportunity never arose, but because, for most of his adult life, he was busy elsewhere—work that, outwardly, seemed a life well lived. He doesn’t discount any of it, but speaks plainly about what those years lacked.
“There’s a big difference between a vocation and a career,” he said. “I’ve had a lot of different careers, but none of them were really all that soulful. I tried to keep one foot in finding my own calling, but I always kept another in what other people expected of me.”
In the end, it was filmmaking that proved to be the calling Nickoloff had long searched for.
On Thursday, You F*ckers Figure It Out: A Jason Molina Story makes its world premiere at the Athens International Film + Video Festival. Nickoloff made it without a script, without prior filmmaking experience, and on a budget he largely built himself—directing, editing, and illustrating a documentary that consumed four and a half years of his life.
He anticipates that the premiere will be “quite cathartic.”
His film’s subject is his late friend Jason Molina, the revered, often mythologized songwriter behind Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Co. For years, Molina told Nickoloff he was an artist and was frustrated when he didn’t act on it.
“I truly never accepted myself as an artist,” Nickoloff said, “until this film.”
Molina died in 2013 at age 39. He did not live to see himself proven right.
The location of the premiere carries its own weight. Both men grew up in Lorain, OH and Molina’s family roots stretch into Appalachia, the same ancient hills that surround Athens.
“It feels like a homecoming,” Nickoloff said. “Not just for the film, but for him.”
Blue Factory Flame
Nickoloff first met Molina in the summer of 1988 on the soccer field at Admiral King High School in Lorain, Ohio. At that time, both were students in the Advanced Studies program. Nickoloff was sixteen; Molina was fourteen.
In the decades after his death, many have cast Molina as a brooding, enigmatic figure, his stark songwriting seeming to emerge from private gloom. The person Nickoloff met nearly forty years ago was far more vibrant.
“He was a ball of energy,” Nickoloff recalled. “Funny, witty, clever.”
Even as a teenager, Molina had already committed himself to a life in art. He pursued it with a focus that made him unique.
This was not easy in Lorain. Once called the International City, it lured generations with industrial jobs, but by the 1980s, steel mills slashed jobs or closed. The Ford plant downsized. Shipyards went quiet. A recession sped up the collapse. Thousands lost work. Opportunity dwindled, but, as Nickoloff said, tenacity and resolve endured.
Sensitivity, however, did not.
“You had to have a thick skin,” Nickoloff said. “You weren’t allowed to express your feelings. Kids like us, our age, you’d get beaten up for reading a book in public.”
Molina ignored expectations and dove into music. He devoured his parents’ records, especially Black Sabbath. By sixteen, he played bass in The Spineriders, recording their first tracks at Magnetic North in Cleveland in 1990. Though often referred to as an alt-country icon, Nickoloff said Molina considered himself a heavy-metal bass player.
“Ozzy Osbourne’s influence on him,” he said, “cannot be understated.”
The two swapped creative work—cassette tapes, sketches, and absurd stories passed on the bus and in Admiral King’s hallways. In those exchanges, Molina saw something Nickoloff didn’t yet claim.
“Jason believed I both could and should be an artist,” Nickoloff said.
Molina’s conviction frustrated him when Nickoloff held back.
“The whole thing really irritated the sh*t out of him,” Nickoloff said. “He let me know it. Even if it was only with a shot from his big black eyes.”
By the early ’90s, with Molina at Oberlin College and Songs: Ohia taking shape, Nickoloff watched quietly, feeling the contrast. The tension between the life Molina urged and the life he lived began then, a tension that would follow Nickoloff for decades.
Though their paths diverged, they kept in touch. Nickoloff last saw Molina in early spring 2002, at a Songs: Ohia show at the Grog Shop in Cleveland.
Molina died in March 2013 of multiple organ failure caused by severe alcoholism. By that time, he had released more than 30 albums, leaving a body of work that continues to grow in reach.
For Nickoloff, the loss brought long-avoided clarity.
“When Jason died, the voice of that person who believed in me and my ability from a very early age was gone,” he said.
In that silence, he saw that the only true obstacle to the life he wanted was himself.
Eight years after Molina’s death, a turning point came in 2021. Nickoloff shared Molina’s song Leave the City with family before a reunion in Lorain. Soon after, his cousin, photographer Kristy Walker, called with an idea. She hadn’t known Molina was from Lorain and suggested making a documentary about him.
This time, unlike in the past, Nickoloff did not hesitate. They began immediately.
Through the Static and Distance
From the start, Nickoloff battled uncertainty about the project. He expected that. What surprised him was how often it was answered.
One night in Savannah stands out. Nickoloff was staying with a friend while moving back to Ohio, passing through on one of several trips to collect his belongings.
He recalls that night like this: he stepped out of his friend’s house onto the porch and into the stillness of the night. Cigarette and beer in hand, he once again asked himself: what was he doing making a film about Jason Molina?
Alone on the porch, he said it out loud. Not to himself—to Molina.
Then, across the street—especially stark against the evening’s quiet—a single palm tree began to quake, not gently with the wind but violently. Its fronds shook against the night before erupting into a burst of black birds, followed, like cosmic punctuation, by an enormous owl rising swiftly and buoyantly from the palm’s crown.
“I was like, all right, bro, I’m hearing you,” Nickoloff said. “Jason always had a connection to birds, owls specifically. There’s just no way to deny that that is meaningful.”
It wasn’t the only occasion. During the film’s creation, Nickoloff says, Molina kept appearing.
Nickoloff once parked by the tree Molina planted as a child. Every light in his van went out. On a cloudy night, he stood outside, asked Molina for a sign, and watched the clouds part over the moon.
“Anytime I ask him for guidance, he somehow gives it to me,” Nickoloff said. “Every time I’ve asked him to supercharge me so I could keep going, he’s done it.”
Those who knew Molina, Nickoloff says, do not doubt these experiences. He no longer tries to be skeptical; they’ve been too frequent to dismiss.
That thread—an ongoing conversation between filmmaker and subject—runs through the film itself.
What Not Knowing Made Possible
When asked what making the film on his own terms allowed him, Nickoloff does not hesitate.
“Well, for one thing, it allowed me to title it You F*ckers Figure It Out,” he said.
More than just a joke, the title also defines the film’s approach. Nickoloff and Walker began without a script, conducted 15 interviews, then returned to the material to find the story.
“Having absolutely no idea what we were doing was kind of a superpower,” Nickoloff said.
They self-financed the project, giving them the autonomy to trust their instincts.
“He’s not being made a hero of,” Nickoloff said. “It’s not, ‘Jason did this and was amazing,’ or ‘it was the best record.’ Instead, here’s the guy we knew—nothing like many fans believe.”
The title also reflects Molina’s creative philosophy. He never explained his lyrics; the meaning was for the listener.
“Jason lived in this world of ‘you decide,’” Nickoloff said. “Like, ‘I made this thing. I’m putting it out in the world. You f*ckers figure it out.’”
Hold On Magnolia
Thirteen years after his death, Jason Molina is having a moment.
He draws roughly 300,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. Former members of Magnolia Electric Co. now tour as Magnolia and Johnson Electric Company, selling out ever-larger venues.
“I think Jason has more fans under the age of 30 now than he did when we were 30,” Nickoloff said. “There’s a huge resurgence.”
Part of the appeal, he believes, lies in how firmly the music resists being pinned to any one moment in time. Max Winter, who studied at Oberlin College and frequently collaborated with Molina, has said that an early Molina song could date to the 1860s, the 1960s, or the 2060s. It refuses to settle into a single era.
“There’s something honest and direct about it,” Nickoloff said. “It’s kind of the antithesis of everything else happening right now.”
The film arrives amid a resurgence but refuses to argue for Molina’s greatness. It lets those who knew him speak.
“All those first-hand accounts,” Nickoloff said, “are what let Jason come through.”
Those who participated brought a generosity that shaped the film—honest, open, unguarded. Nickoloff wove their memories into something that resists tidy conclusions and avoids unnecessary explanation.
Molina never did.
The film carries a quiet sense of the supernatural—a suggestion that Molina may still be present in some form, still sending signals to those who pay attention.
As for that part, Nickoloff leaves it where Molina would have: “You can figure that out for yourself, too.”
You F*ckers Figure It Out: A Jason Molina Story premieres Thursday, April 16 at 7:15 p.m. Find more information about the premiere at this link.