No matter that the big reveal may be nothing of the sort – particularly given the high-profile coverage that the recent rediscovery of Rodriguez's music has sparked this remains splendidly uplifting and life-affirming fare, heartfelt and joyous in its love of its subject, unabashed in its desire to "print the legend". Yet Searching for Sugar Man has none of the cynicism of that altogether more spurious journey, instead spinning its extraordinary yarn as if from a pre-internet age, relying upon the honest testimony of those who were genuinely cut off from the wider world, and for whom the cold facts of Rodriguez's life were indeed a foreign country. On one level, it's as knowingly manipulative as Catfish, the controversial (mock?)doc that purported to follow the wide-eyed infatuation of an internet romancer while clearly knowing from the outset where this story would end. Mixing interviews, music, and inventive animation, Malik Bendjelloul's riveting film follows Rodriguez's cloud-covered trail back to Detroit, picking its way judiciously through the debris of archival evidence, following the money (at least up to a point), deliberately using the trees to stop us from seeing the enchanting narrative wood.
According to one version of the story, the unappreciated singer-songwriter had set himself on fire on stage, going out in a horrendous blaze of sacrificial glory. Having first made inroads into the middle-class party scene thanks to bootleg recordings, Rodriguez attained folk-hero status among those who knew only that he had taken his own life after being ignored in the US – a powerful voice of protest snubbed out by corporate indifference. Having recorded a couple of inspiring but utterly overlooked albums ( Cold Fact and Coming from Reality), Detroit-based Rodriguez bizarrely became a cult figure among disaffected Afrikaner youth in the mid-70s, enjoying a popularity on a par with Elvis Presley or Simon and Garfunkel.
If you're still unfamiliar with the quasi-mythical story of Sixto Rodriguez (as most people outside South Africa and Australia apparently were until this award-winning documentary made headlines) then Searching for Sugar Man (2012, StudioCanal, 12) tells a story so seeped in intertwining fact and fiction that you may start to wonder whether the whole thing isn't a set-up. A s we all learned from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, there's a truth in legends that transcends mere facts.