NEIL YOUNG TRUNK SHOW

★★ 1/2 out of four stars • Rating: Not rated • Where: Lagoon

The flying hair, the furrowed brow, the possessed eyes. Ever wonder what it's like to be in the eye of the hurricane that is Neil Young rocking out onstage?

"Neil Young Trunk Show: Scenes From a Concert" gives you a front-row view (and sometimes a drummer's-eye view) of the irrepressible rock god. Watch him rock out on the 21-minute "Hidden Path" and spin acoustic tales like the rambling "Ambulance Blues." You can see it, you can hear it, but you really can't feel it.

The second in a planned trilogy of Young concert films by director Jonathan Demme doesn't quite make you feel as if you're at this concert in Philadelphia in 2007. Where's the audience? You occasionally see a shadowed head but you never hear, see or feel the energy of the crowd.

Where's the flow of the show? Demme jumps from an acoustic guitar number to an electric performance and back again, in a disorienting order that ignores Young's own arc of the evening. The director favors lesser-known songs, shaky camerawork and just a little offstage footage ("the doctor" makes a dressing room call to cure Young's split fingernail).

"Trunk Show" is less satisfying than Demme's 2006 "Heart of Gold," which captured Young in his acoustic glory. If you want to experience the godfather of grunge in his full ragged glory in concert, check out the 1979 movie "Rust Never Sleeps," screening April 7 at the Trylon Microcinema in Minneapolis.

JON BREAM

TERRIBLY HAPPY

★★ 1/2 out of four stars • Unrated; violence, drinking and adult situations. • Where: Edina

There's something rotten in Denmark, all right. With its pungent blend of violence and whimsy, "Terribly Happy" proves that windswept rural Jutland can be fertile ground for a Coenesque everything-goes-wrong crime story.

Jakob Cedergren (imagine a Danish Ben Affleck) plays a Copenhagen cop assigned to a podunk town while he recovers from a nervous breakdown. There's not much for this one-man police department to do. There's no economic crime in the village beyond children shoplifting, but its toxic combination of personalities keeps everyone on edge. The creepy-funny locals have deep-sixed more than a few troublemakers in the nearby bog, legend has it, and they don't like snoops nosing around. The tension builds remorselessly and before you know it, Cedergren is off the wagon, popping pills and convinced his landlord's cat is talking to him.

He also thinks he knows what's afoot when pretty battered wife Lene Maria Christensen asks for protection, making it clear she'd like a bodyguard with benefits. Husband-from-hell Kim Bodnia is a nasty piece of work; maybe if he got to be dead it wouldn't be such a bad thing. The lawman and the brute circle warily before facing off in a mano-a-mano drinking showdown at the local saloon. Fate drags the leading characters down into the quagmire as their schemes backfire, people die, alibis slip and justice is perverted in creative ways. Director Henrik Ruben Genz gets top-notch work from his cast; the look on Cedergren's face when a "dead" character revives is classic sucker astonishment.

COLIN COVERT