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Townes Van Zandt did. "My life will run out before my work does," he said. "I designed it that way." One of the first songs he ever wrote was called "Waiting Around to Die." He was barely out of his teens. He died of heart failure in 1997 at 52, after years of drug and alcohol abuse, the requisite renegade musician's acts of self-destructive insanity, and sessions of shock therapy.

He once glued his mouth shut and had his teeth knocked out with a hammer. As a college student, the Texas singer-songwriter sat on a balcony four stories above the ground.

He leaned over the edge.

He wondered what it would feel like if he fell, and so he did.

He landed on his back.

Certain musicians know they will be celebrated in death. Their knowledge of the business goes too deep for its own good. For some - Kurt Cobain comes to mind - the notion looks more like a perverse career path than a certainty. For others it's a weary acknowledgement of odds.

That resigned sigh is at the heart of Margaret Brown's Be Here to Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt (Palm Pictures, $24.98) - the latest remarkable movie about a musician in a season that brims with smart movies about music. It received a limited theatrical run last year and arrives on video this week.

Be Here to Love Me is the loneliest of the bunch. Dave Chappelle's Block Party is the best, a celebration and portrait of a movement; Awesome! I ... Shot That, from the Beastie Boys, is the usual concert film cliches with a few clever tweaks; Neil Young: Heart of Gold is an assessment of a life, and The Devil and Daniel Johnson (opening this spring) parallels the obscurity and madness of Van Zandt.

But only Brown's picture feels haunted, and only Brown calls a mystery a mystery. It never explains his behavior or attempt to fit the pieces of his life into an order that sheds light on why he lived so carelessly and died so slowly. Instead, like Van Zandt's songs, it goes for a mood that captures the spirit of those songs - melancholy and spare.

You don't know those songs?

Of course, you don't.

Now that the man is dead, he is celebrated all out of proportion to his life - which was sad, modest, and brief, like his songs.

And by "all out of proportion," I mean it's a shock he's celebrated at all. Van Zandt had that deadliest of career labels: a singer-songwriter's singer-songwriter. Like an artist's artist or director's director, he was known more as a great secret than a great success.

There's a heartbreaking clip in Brown's film of Van Zandt on an old TNN talk show hosted by Ralph Emery. He's asked where his records can be found; the producers of the show are big fans but they haven't found a single one. Van Zandt struggles to answer then admits, well, his life's work is not in circulation.

Later, we visit the world headquarters of his label, Tomato Records. It's a man's apartment.

During a career that stretched from the late 1960s until his death, Van Zandt's biggest hits (presumably, along with most of his income) came when others recorded his work.

Adding a layer of delicacy to a song so fragile it already seemed in danger of crumbling, Emmylou Harris pulled a classic out of "If I Needed You"; and you'd be hard-pressed to find many Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard fans who think of the duo's chart-topper "Pancho and Lefty" as a rerecorded Van Zandt song.

Asked why all his songs are so sad, he replied: "Oh, I don't know. I have a few that aren't."

Maybe that's why he stayed a record-lover's secret, but Brown isn't interested in nailing down reasons for that, either. And she doesn't rely on talking heads. Guy Clark, Joe Ely, Kris Kristofferson, and Steve Earle, among others, don't praise him in bite-sized quips. They reminisce, they hang out in bars and let whoever happens to be in the room listen in. His ex-wife makes it plain: He was unknowable. He makes appearances in home movies, and his disembodied voice (recorded during interviews) wafts behind images of deserted hotel rooms and trees rushing past windows.

Be Here to Love Me does, in the end, what great obituaries should: It presents a life that was just passing through, that made a mark, however small. Its images never decide on the man's importance, only that he was loved by a few. Brown's film, like its subject, seems content to be overlooked. It's a beautiful loser.

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ROUND ON THE ENDS AND HIGH IN THE MIDDLE: So, where are all the great films about Ohio? Are there any? Did I miss something? Or is it that living in Ohio doesn't inspire great movies? Whatever the answer, The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio (DreamWorks, $29.99), now on DVD, is pretty much what we expect when Hollywood looks between coasts.

Julianne Moore plays the real-life Evelyn Ryan, Defiance native and winner of a very large number of poetry competitions and write-your-own-jingle contests. She subsidized her family on the results. Daughter Terry wrote a memoir of those lean times in the '60s, and DreamWorks made a dutifully perky tearjerker that plays like an Epcot version of Ohio.

Hall of Housewives, anyone?

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GHOST IN THE MACHINE: Speaking of unseen movies, annually the magazine Film Comment asks its critics to choose the best unreleased films of the year. For a while Kiyoshi Kurosawa's spooky Pulse (Magnolia, $26.98) felt like a regular.

Something of a knowing knock-off of Ringu (later Americanized as The Ring), Pulse tells the story of a group of people who disappear into the Internet, one by one until Tokyo itself starts to appear eerily empty. I will say no more, except that Kurosawa (no relation to movie legend Akira Kurosawa) applies the rules of modern Japanese horror to a film that's all metaphor and mysterious vibes, short on story.

Which, in this case, is a good thing. He offers no explanations for what you're watching - there's nothing less scary than a reasonable explanation of why you are scared. We should be lucky to get such tantalizing obtuseness when the big Hollywood remake arrives in July.

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TABLE MANNERS: It's hard enough imagining a time when theater owners had the patience to run cartoons and newsreels before the feature presentation. Picturing the contents of Paramount Comedy Shorts 1928-1942: Robert Benchley and the Knights of the Algonquin (Kino, $29.95) playing before your Saturday night at the movies is a mind-blower.

Here is a collection of 14 veddy veddy erudite skits starring intellectuals, humorists, famous authors, men about town, other people you don't want to see in movie theaters anymore, delivering deadpan satires of domestic life and politics. Donald Ogden Stewart, who wrote the screenplay for Philadelphia Story, lectures on the difficulty of crossing Broadway. Benchley, whose Algonquin Roundtable set was the definition of sophisticated urbanity in the 1930s, offers The Sex Life of the Polyp. If the ironies are dated, the sensibility is not at all: The jokes are not in the punchlines, but in the concept itself.

How very Steve Martin.

How very modern.

Contact Christopher Borrelli at: cborrelli@theblade.com
or 419-724-6117.

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