Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic

"The Easy Kind" isn't the easiest kind of film to describe to someone watching it for the first time, as audiences did at its Telluride Film Festival premiere this past weekend. At first glance, it might seem like a documentary about esteemed country singer Elizabeth Cook, who has a fairly large following for an independent artist, given her nearly 25-year discography and her SiriusXM radio show. But it quickly becomes clear to anyone who hasn't seen the "narrative" notation in the program notes that much of the film is scripted. David Letterman, Cook's biggest real-life supporter, plays himself in one scene, but Karen Allen, Charles Esten and Susie Essum have character roles, and Cook himself is "EC," who shares the singer's exact career history but has a few fictional romantic interests.

But why would an artist who could be characterized as country-rock limit himself to purely musical hybrids, while there is a director who is interested in cinematic crossbreeds?

That filmmaker is Katy Chevigny, whose filmography consists of documentaries, many of them award-winning (including “Deadline,” which she co-directed with Kirsten Johnson, and Sundance and SXSX debuts like “E-Team” and “Election Day”). In order to capture what it’s like to be an established female artist in mid-career, she’s taken the position, perhaps unusually for such a dedicated documentarian, that narrative film can be just a little bit more true than nonfiction … or at least that the combination of the two can work wonders. Anything but your standard “music film,” anyway.