‘Finding Lucinda’ film follows Avery Hellman’s musical journey

Spoiler alert: “Finding Lucinda” is not really about tracking down iconic Americana singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams. At least, not in the literal sense, like “Finding Nemo” and “Finding Forrester” set out in search of a wayward clownfish and a reclusive novelist.

It’s a documentary about a budding musician named Avery Hellman who sets out on a hero’s journey to glean inspiration from their idol’s humble beginnings.

“It’s kind of finding yourself through understanding somebody else,” says Hellman, who performs under the name ISMAY, and prefers gender-neutral pronouns. The granddaughter of the late Warren Hellman, who founded Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco, once raised sheep and farmed a 250-acre ranch in the Sonoma Mountain foothills. Today, they live in Tahoe, leaving their mother to run the family ranch.

Premiering next week at SF IndieFest in San Francisco, “Finding Lucinda” is equal parts tone poem and road movie, but more than anything it’s a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman desperately in need of confidence.

“I’m not the kind of person who came out of the womb with the sense that I’m the best thing to hit this planet,” says Hellman, 29. “For me, it’s more of a struggle to feel like OK, I’m good enough as I am. I don’t need to change and become better before I’m worthy of going out there and playing music. Which I think can be a wonderful thing, since it means I take my time.

“It’s also a challenge. No matter how many people tell you that you’re good enough, you kind of have to buy into that idea yourself. And that’s a really complicated thing for a person to develop. It’s not like there’s a line you cross and say, now I will never doubt myself ever again.”

Part of the issue, they admit, is just trying to live up to the last name “Hellman,” not unlike growing up a Tenenbaum in a Wes Anderson movie. “There are a lot of people in my family who’ve done really incredible things,” Hellman says. “And I think knowing that you have this family where it’s possible that you could be this amazing person, like my grandfather was or like his kids are or extended family, it can just be sort of like, ‘Wow, if I’m mediocre, what is wrong with me?’ So, I think there's a little bit of pressure there.”

If her grandfather was an investment banker with a banjo habit, Hellman was a kid who dreamed of following in the footsteps of the musicians he booked, like Emmylou Harris and Steve Earle, who played Hardly Strictly Bluegrass nearly every October. But Lucinda Williams was always their favorite, thanks to slow-burning poetic lyrics and complex, layered compositions. At 23, Hellman joined with their father Mick Hellman on drums to form a Lucinda Williams tribute band called Lake Charlatans. They played the Bay Area club circuit, and at some point, instead of making an album, they dreamed up the idea to make a documentary.

The early star of the film is beautiful pastoral footage of Sonoma County farmland, as Hellman works with sheep and plays guitar in the barn. The mood is meditative, with a plaintive voice and music is rooted firmly in Americana roots past and present. Hopping in a beat-up pickup truck, they set out on a pandemic roadtrip in 2020, encountering veteran musicians Charlie Sexton, Mary Gauthier, Buddy Miller, John Grimaudo and Los Texmaniacs along the way. Sexton, who played with Lucinda before he was a teenager, offers a glimpse of her long before her breakout album “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.” The guitarist on that seminal album, Buddy Miller, offers more sage advice, as does Grimaudo, who played guitar on Williams’ first album.

At Malaco Records in Jackson, Mississippi, Hellman gets to listen to some of Williams’ earliest recordings. “It makes me a little sad when I hear it, because I think for myself, I struggle more maybe than she did with that sense of being needed,” she says in the film. “And then to realize how much I hold myself back.”

But it’s Gauthier who steals the show, explaining how “there is intrinsic discomfort in this job, and it comes whether you have a tour bus and 10 Grammys” or not. And no matter how successful you are, she says, you still have to wake up the next morning and stare at a blank page.

By the time Hellman lands outside a Lucinda Williams concert at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, the spell is unraveling: “I need to move on and do my own thing,” she says. “And not find my identity in something else.”

So what does Lucinda think about the movie?

San Francisco singer-songwriter Chuck Prophet, who also helped produce the film, sent the documentary to Williams, but no one’s heard back yet. They think she’s watched a clip of it. “She gave it her blessing when we started making it, but we don't know yet that she’s actually seen the whole film,” Hellman says.

It seems the gravelly Southern singer, who Time Magazine once named “America’s best songwriter,” and who has a song for nearly every city she’s lived in – Jackson, Baton Rouge, Little Rock, Lake Charles – would at least appreciate the cinematic road trip and inward journey – and the act of coming out the other side a different person.

“I have changed since making that movie,” Hellman says. “And definitely those experiences have made me realize that it is sad to hold myself back and not just let it be what it is. I think the thing that has kept me going is realizing the music has a life of its own. It’s not me, it’s not owned by me. It’s kind of its own spirit in a way.”

In the end, the sequel to the documentary (which could have been called “Finding Avery”) is her new ISMAY album “Desert Pavement,” just released in January. “While I was making the film I went and made that record in North Carolina, and I felt the making of that record made me so much more confident as well,” she says. “It was a wonderful experience working with the producer, and I think having his respect and the amount of fun that we had making that record with that band definitely boosted my confidence, and made me feel like, ‘Oh wow, maybe I am pretty good at this.’”