Ashes of American Flags, a film about Wilco recorded over a stretch of tour last year that saw the band across the American south, is not a documentary. The film follows the band through five different cities, but the shows are depicted in reverse of the actual tour dates. Some show footage is spliced together to move the narrative along. It’s a concert film, but it’s more than a movie of a concert; a studio-produced live recording might be the way to think about it. And as such, the movie conveys not only some incredible artistry by Wilco, but real talent on behalf of collaborators Cristoph Green and Brendan Canty.

It’s important to recognize going in that this movie is not a sequel to I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, the 2002 Wilco doc by Sam Jones. Canty and Green have given the band a sheen that you do not find in Heart. That gloss is a product both of choice and circumstance. For starters, Wilco are pretty clearly in a better place than they were during the recording of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. During that session, the band was dropped from their label and fired a member. Had their tour van been stolen, they’d’ve experienced the trifecta of band-related disasters in a single year.

Moreover, Heart was filmed in the studio. As Canty emphasized in a Q&A following Saturday’s Filmfest DC screening at the Avalon, and as any musician who’s toured and recorded knows, recording an album is more stressful than touring an album. In the studio, there isn’t a decision about a single sound that can be taken for granted. Every aspect of the collaboration is tested during recording. It’s as much a philosophy as an album that results, in the best of cases.