Film Review: ‘Carmine Street Guitars’

A stunningly delicate, soft-spoken cinematic slice of music history that doubles as a vital act of historical documentation.

Lower Manhattan is totally unrecognizable to my Brooklyn-born dad. The “bohemian scuff,” as he describes it, that defined Greenwich Village has almost been completely polished off by real estate developers, hipster-y fusion restaurants, and mom-and-pop coffee shops. New York City has always been about change, but as gentrification continues to violently claw its way through five boroughs like some dirty, greedy mole, erecting high-rise temples to foreigner’s laundering and the uber-rich, this once mildly-affordable metropolis’ important, cultural history is being placed on the chopping block constantly.

It is probably this endless, brutal erasure that compelled Canadian director Ron Mann to craft a cinematic ode named after and focused on one of Manhattan’s last bohemian shops: Carmine Street Guitars. In 2019, it really shouldn’t exist. Carmine Street, right off of 6th avenue, is next to a luxurious slew of neighboring stores like Sweetgreen, GROM gelato, and other $15-and-up restaurants. There is even a Guitar Center close by that looms over. But owner Rick Kelly and his famous handcrafted guitars are so stunningly beautiful and unique that he is able to keep the lights on thanks to his impressive old and new clientele list, which includes legends like Patti Smith, Bob Dylan, Kurt Vile, and Kirk Douglas.

For the past twenty years, Kelly, a legend himself, has been scavenging New York City construction sites and dumpsters for his materials. Sometimes, he’ll even have to hop a fence or two to get what he wants. Working with perfect slabs of lumber would be easier, but he enjoys working with imperfections of the reclaimed wood—to him, its scars and blemishes don’t degrade the final product, but actually give it character and a distinct identity. Like wrinkles on a person’s face, its deformities ultimately tell a story. In fact, these guitars have become an important part of New York City history, something that is sadly fleeting with each passing day. In a sense, he is acting the part of a historical preservationist; yet at the end of the day, his work isn’t driven by lofty goal—it is his childlike curiosity that drives his abounding passion for guitar making. “No one piece of wood is the same,” he told me at his shop. “The possibilities are endless. I’ll never stop doing this.”

Although he is the owner of Carmine Street Guitars, it isn’t a one-person team. His cooler than cool apprentice, Cindy Heluj, a charismatic art-school graduate with bleach blonde hair that looks like she could front her own Riot Grrrl band. As Kelly recalls, she just “walked in one day,” and that was that. Ambitious, wildly talented, and absolutely in-love with the craft, Heluj has been training for the past seven years under Kelly’s tutelage, and her hard work has paid off. She told me that her personal waiting list is now seven months long, so clearly, she is in high-demand. Unfortunately, she still deals with misogynistic bullshit from time-to-time. “The men that come in here sometimes won’t even talk to me, or assume I am some sort of receptionist,” she told me. “But at this point, I just hold my ground and deal with it.”

Whatever the future beholds for Carmine Street Guitars and the rest of the city, Kelly and Heluj won’t be doing anything different. In fact, Kelly tries to remain the past as much as possible. Instead of updating his life to involve iPhone’s and personal laptops, Rick Kelly lives in a technology-less world of its own. “You need to move into the 21st century,” Heluj said playfully in the documentary.” Perhaps the only bit of change to the shop is that it now has an Instagram, a smart move by Heluj that will help secure the shop’s future. Kelly responds to her jab almost too nonchantaly, saying just one word: “Why?” In a society that enforces digital interconnectivity as if it were some mandate, I can’t really blame him.

Opening at New York’s storied Film Forum on April 24, 2019.