A Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake

How do you film a biography of an enigma who died at such a young age (26) that he barely had a life? One way is to keep it short. During part of this tender tribute, the camera gazes at the pastoral landscape around Tanworth-in-Arden, the village where the English singer-songwriter grew up in upper-middle-class comfort. With his haunting music playing in the background, these scenes define the film, whose principal voice belongs to Drake's sorrowful older sister, Gabrielle, as a cinematic tone poem as much as a biography. Drake emerges as a painfully shy introvert, obsessed with his guitar, who expressed himself predominantly in music. Before he died in 1974 from an overdose of the antidepressant Tryptizol (whether accidental or deliberate, no one will ever know), Drake released three albums that carried a strain of introspective English folk-pop to a zenith of pure, melancholy beauty.