Young at Heart

There is a choir in Northampton called Young at Heart. The average age of its members is over eighty. What they sing is Sonic Youth, The Clash, James Brown and Coldplay. The documentary follows the last six weeks of rehearsal before a concert in their own town. The new songs are hard, the rehearsals are exhausting, and several of the members are getting through them with serious illnesses. Stephen Walker's documentary takes a choir that has toured Europe and sung for royalty and shows them not as a novelty but as people. Rehearsal scenes and hospital scenes follow one another. The force of the film comes from its refusal to separate the two.