When asked to consider the absentee fatherhood of "Ramblin'" Jack Elliott, a Woody Guthrie protégé who translated his plaintive folk style for future generations, Guthrie's son Arlo wonders whether the world needs a good family man more than it needs a genuine musical legend. For Arlo and the rest of the folk community, the choice is clear, but for Jack's daughter Aiyana, it carries a painful resonance she hasn't been able to shake. At once a tribute and a lament, Aiyana Elliott's poignant, one-of-a-kind documentary, The Ballad Of Ramblin' Jack, is her attempt to resurrect a criminally unheralded talent while coming to terms with a missing piece in her life. Deftly mixing old live performances and home movies with video footage from a recent father-daughter road trip, she tells two histories simultaneously, one of Jack's hard-traveling road as a flat-picking guitarist and singer, the other of the personal wreckage he left in his wake. Ironically, Jack Elliott—a voice later hailed as one of the most authentic in American folk music—was actually born Elliott Adnopoz, the son of a Jewish doctor in Brooklyn. But from childhood, he was determined to shake his roots and become a real cowboy, eventually landing a job as a groom at a rodeo and teaching himself how to play guitar. After hearing Woody Guthrie's songs on the radio, Elliott made a pilgrimage to his Coney Island home and the two became friends, a relationship that would become especially important once Guthrie died. Carrying on his mentor's tradition as a working-class journeyman, Elliott had an enormous impact on a range of musicians, including Bob Dylan, who has never fully acknowledged his influence. Aiyana Elliott was a product of his third marriage (of four), which he left behind while she was very young. In a particularly wrenching scene on their road trip, Jack tries to show Aiyana her childhood home in Mendocino, California, where they lived for five years, but he can't remember the right driveway. At times, her need to confront her father about his broken family seems needlessly cruel and exploitative, especially with the camera present. But, despite the sad undercurrents of their story, The Ballad Of Ramblin' Jack is, finally, Aiyana's gift to her father, a beautiful reverie timed to his folk songs, which should outlast them both.