Exit Music: Cameron Mullenneaux

Ethan Rice’s music is odd and crunchy—like mid 50s Thelonious Monk it revels in odd atonal rhythm chords and chromatic melody lines that blossom into strange, unpredictable shapes. Clearly influenced by 90s indie rock like Neutral Milk Hotel, his music feels like a blown raspberry at all things stuffy and self-serious. There’s precious little of it, and there will never be more, for Ethan Rice is dead now. He was twenty-eight years old, surviving approximately 27 years and 9 months longer than his doctors expected when he was diagnosed with Cystic Fibrosis as a newborn. Refusing to give up, his family reshaped itself to provide him with around-the-clock care, his father Ed even becoming a stay-at-home dad. A Vietnam veteran with PTSD, Ed had retreated into a world of therapeutic art, one he eagerly shared with Ethan as he grew and struggled and, somehow, survived. Yet Ethan’s time was limited—everyone knew the oxygen tanks, chest massages, and antibiotics were only stalling tactics. But these gave Ethan the time to create and his family the time to love him. Cameron Mullenneaux’s Exit Music is an almost impossibly moving and poignant documentary of Ethan’s last days, charting his fatal decline, hospice preparations, and final moments, all while painting a portrait of a young man defiant to the last to drink every drop of life the cosmos owed him for his unfair existence. But instead of regarding Ethan as a passive subject, Mullenneaux engaged with him as a collaborator, using his original music as a soundtrack and his stop-motion animations with action figures and Play-Doh as interludes. The result is a cinematic hybrid literally conversant with its subject, giving Ethan the dignity of setting the tone and timbre of his dying. Exit Music is also the portrait of a family struggling to cope with a dying child they know they can do nothing to protect. There are multiple interviews with Ed where we realize his ordeals with Ethan pulled him from the hell of PTSD into one possibly even more traumatic, and we get the sense from his mother and brother that Ethan’s survival was both a blessing and a prison. But Ethan lives now, forever, here in these 75 minutes. He can’t suffer or hurt anymore—there’s just a young man, his memories, and his music. Rest now, Ethan. And thank you.

Rating: 8/10