Nine years after Merle Haggard ’s death at 79, Ethan Hawke has organized a public wake, and it’s a humdinger. A biography by way of California road trip and recording-studio extravaganza, Highway 99: A Double Album is, at its soul-stirring core, a gathering of several dozen musicians singing the country great’s praises, mainly by singing his songs.

In a sense Hawke is doing here what he did a few years ago in The Last Movie Stars , his docuseries portrait of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward: He’s stirring up a conversation about a legendary performer. That earlier doc felt more theoretical for two key reasons: Hawke’s searching convos were confined to pandemic-era Zoom, and the subject was acting as opposed to music, with its more visceral immediacy. But while they’re very differ

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