It is very rare to find a documentary that is timeless. Most documentaries are mediocre  and even the good ones are things you see once and never need to watch again. The last truly great documentary was My Architect (2003.) Ten years later, we have another: Searching for Sugar Man.

Here, all the very best possibilities of a documentary come together. The topic is fascinating, and the dramatic and aesthetic framing of the mystery of the artist Rodriguez defies criticism. The flow of information to the viewer over the course of the documentary is exquisitely done, as is the pacing and the choice of visuals and their interweaving with interview footage. This documentary should be studied for how it is put together. It is a masterpiece.

Then there is the music of Rodriguez, the marvelousness of which is also a big part of the documentary’s power. He really was a unique musical quantity; he sounds to me like a combination of Dylan, Jim Croce, and Donovan, but mixed with a decidedly more modern musical sensibility. As this would imply, there is a freshness to the songs that is rarely heard. Moreover, the songs are all quite distinct pieces of art, each remarkable in their own way, yet each clearly a part of a coherent overall musical vision. And on top of all this, he is writing about incredibly poignant topics: his experience among the desperate urban poor in Detroit, and conveying it in song with a mysterious loveliness; whereas someone like a young Bruce Springsteen dramatized (in a good way) the lives of the poor working class, this guy instead transforms it into a sort of gentle poetry. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anything like it.

There is yet another magical feature to this story. The almost delirious adoration of Rodriguez in South Africa, contrasted with his complete anonymity here, is to me a beautiful metaphor for what has happened to popular music. Over the last 20 years, pop music stopped mattering to people, or perhaps more accurately, it stopped functioning as an emotional anchor for the population and instead transformed into a kind of supporting appendage to various visual media phenomenon. As this happened, all the soul (both musical and lyrical) drained out of popular music, in part because only a narrow range of musical and lyrical motifs fit music’s new role as a soundtrack to visual distraction; as a simple example, think about the kind of pop songs that are used in every effective movie preview of the last five years, how they all basically sound exactly the same. Rodriguez came to popularity during South Africa’s most repressive period, and his music became part of the lives of people who were dreaming of something better, became part of their lives in the old way – the music merged with the people themselves. Their passion for his songs through the decades echos the lost possibilities of popular music, flushed away perhaps forever by the greed of record companies and by a stampeding transformation in technology. The question of why people don’t really listen to music anymore is too big for this review, but Searching for Sugar Man gives a glimpse at least into why they used to.

If you are in New York City, be sure to catch it in theaters before it leaves (it’s still playing at the Village East.) Otherwise, Netflix it and enjoy this lovely work of art.