Love him or hate him or just kind of wish he'd get a new hat, it's difficult to deny Neil Young's knack for creating order out of chaos, consistently finding wobbly, exquisite grace notes amid torrents of howling feedback. CSNY: Déjà Vu, Young's ambitious combination of rockumentary and war protest piece (directed, à la 2003's Greendale, under his nom de plume Bernard Shakey) is, true to form, a bit of a mess. Unlike his albums, however, there's no spidery whammy-bar wizardry here to balance things out.

Narrated by ABC news correspondent Mike Cerre and featuring a number of heartfelt interviews with Iraqi veterans, the film follows Young's 2006 reunion with Crosby, Stills and Nash, as they hit the road to support Young's Living with War album, battling unamused Bush supporters and their own rickety frames at every stop. Give Young credit for getting beyond the standard tour-bus and backstage environments, but the broad scope ultimately gives short shrift to both the veterans and the legendary discord among the bandmates (Stephen Stills, aka the member most likely to plonk Young over the head with a guitar during the group's heyday, is allowed to voice a brief note of ambivalence about the tour, but precious little else).

Longtime CSNY fans may still find things to savor (the sequence where the quartet performs "Let's Impeach the President" in front of a stadium full of booing red-staters is one for the time capsule), but as a whole, this falls somewhere between warts-and-all documentary and glad-handing publicity piece. Case in point: Young generously includes snippets from negative reviews about the tour, but then has them read in a series of overly cartoonish voice-overs. Should a sequel occur, I'm hoping to be immortalized by Larry the Cable Guy.