Culture
Review: ‘You F*ckers Figure It Out: A Jason Molina Story’
By: Emily Votaw
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There is a moment early in You F*ckers Figure It Out: A Jason Molina Story when someone recalls how, as a young child, Jason would plant himself as close as possible to the kerosene heater that warmed his family’s trailer during brutal winters on the shore of Lake Erie.
Photographs accompany the memory: a doe-eyed boy growing up in Lorain, OH, amid the peculiar loneliness of a post-industrial landscape where the promise of the American Dream had long since begun to decay. Jason’s younger brother and sister remember with fondness the make-believe kingdoms they built there — “like Lord of the Flies, but in a good way,” his brother says — in a place not quite rural, but “where other people didn’t live,” where the towering red brick waterworks building down the road was, naturally, a castle.
These are small details, easily forgotten. Yet they lodge in the mind with the same strange, pleasurable intensity of a great song, not because they explain anything, but because they feel unmistakably true.
Tommy Nickoloff’s You F*ckers Figure It Out: A Jason Molina Story doesn’t try to superimpose a three-act structure over the complexity of a human life. Instead, it moves with the mercurial, intensely human logic much closer to how we become obsessed with a song than how we tally a receipt. That same instinct runs through everything the film does.
The result is something documentaries about revered musicians rarely manage: not just the story of a career, but the human life of such an artist told in the dynamic cadence of interior monologue.
The film does not try to “solve” the mystery of Jason Molina. Wisely, it circles him through interwoven interviews with the people who knew him best, casting memory backward through warm recollections, outright contradictions, and family folklore. The title gives the method away from the outset. “Figure it out” becomes less a challenge than an invitation. The audience must participate, assembling a person from fragments just as Molina’s songs have long coaxed unnamed parts of his listeners into the light.
Nickoloff’s first film carries the intimacy of something only someone who truly knew and loved Molina could make. He and Molina grew up together, after all, both artistically inclined kids from the same city in Northeast Ohio.
Even as a child, Molina was a voracious reader. He consumed all manner of literature, from obscure manuals for experiences he would never have to poetry in languages he did not fully understand, and, fittingly enough, examples of one of the finest literary forms popularized in the twentieth century: choose-your-own-adventure books.
One of the film’s smartest structural gestures borrows from that form, sometimes presenting variations on the same anecdote in split screen, each interviewee recalling it just a bit differently. Every story leads toward another, each buoyed by its own smaller mysteries, the film refusing to flatten any of them into diagnosis or neat conclusion.
Sometimes this applies to small, entertaining details, such as whether Molina ever met George Jones and, if he did, whether he cried when it happened. Other times, it illuminates Molina’s habit of telling tall tales, whether from instinct, for amusement, or to avoid harsher truths.
Interviewees recall slightly different versions of what they all call ‘the spider story’ — Molina claimed a highly venomous spider bit him on an airplane, sending him to the hospital. He used the tale to explain his condition while concealing the real cause: the worsening toll of severe alcoholism, which would eventually kill him through multiple organ failure. The film handles such moments with care, humanizing its subject while still allowing generously for the complication of facts.
It also allows us to understand Molina as someone whose catalog contains enormous sorrow, but whose friends and family remember a goofy, brilliant oddball, a man of strange mannerisms, dumb jokes, and genuine warmth. That contrast grants a pulse to a figure many know only through songs of ache and spectral endurance.
Many music documentaries seek to preserve a legacy. You F*ckers Figure It Out: A Jason Molina Story understands that the more honest and generous thing is to complicate one — to hand the audience a person made of fragments and contradictions, trusting them to do the rest.
Instead of the mythic, brooding songwriter many have imagined Molina to be, you leave the film with the sense of someone never quite in sync with the times he found himself in, part of a much older lineage of people who tried to leave some mark through song, language, or image. Molina’s work has always felt like it belonged to a conversation older than any of us, and likely to continue long after us. Nickoloff’s film understands that. So does anyone who has ever been overcome with catharsis at finding a deep, aching part of themselves inside one of Molina’s songs.
Figure it out. And somehow, improbably, you do.