In many ways, James Brown defies comprehension. He performed relentlessly for nearly six decades, beginning in the early nineteen-fifties. When he put his shows together, he rehearsed every move, every step, every interlude. In front of an audience, however, he surged beyond calculation, and entered a region both frenzied and rapturous. Other R. & B. and soul performers may have had greater gifts (Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Sam Cooke) and some rock-and-roll stars may have been just as entertaining (Little Richard, before he found God), but no one else had Brown’s convulsive blend of musical genius and ecstasy. He was strong enough and shrewd enough to cast aside good taste; he screamed and grunted and, turning his head, telegraphed indecipherable messages to his backup players, all of it part of an unstoppable flow. He was an overwhelming talent, and also an overtly sexual presence onstage—something that whites did not see much of in black male celebrities in the fifties and the early sixties, before Muhammad Ali changed everything. For many in the audience (especially the white audience), James Brown was exciting and discomforting in equal measure.
“Get On Up,” the bio-pic devoted to Brown’s life and music, is surprisingly candid. The movie insists that “the godfather of soul” could be soulless—at least in his personal relationships. Again and again, Brown (Chadwick Boseman) is manipulative, violent, greedy, and just plain elusive. He hurts many of the people who are close to him (though the film only hints at the brutalities of his later years). At the same time, “Get On Up” does something that most fans would not have thought possible: using the original recordings and a lot of lip-synching, staging, and choreography, the movie re-creates Brown in full cry. Surrounded by his band and his singers, he gives everything of himself to his audience. That’s where the man’s soul was, the movie tells us. It’s hardly a fresh insight, but to see it reënacted with this much skill is thrilling. Bette Midler, in “The Rose” (1979), brought her mixture of pungent wit and emotional vitality to the role of a self-destructive genius—Janis Joplin in all but name. “The Rose” has been forgotten, and it should be revived, but “Get On Up,” as a portrait of a singer-songwriter, surpasses it. This movie will never need reviving. Brown’s innovative rhythms will always make his music sound contemporary.
It has taken a long time for Hollywood to recognize what Brown and other soul musicians accomplished. Taylor Hackford struggled for fifteen years to get his Ray Charles bio-pic, “Ray” (2004), off the ground. The producer Brian Grazer obtained the rights to James Brown’s story thirteen years ago. He developed a script with the British screenwriting team of John-Henry and Jez Butterworth. But Brown died in 2006 and the project stalled, until Mick Jagger, who then held the rights, proposed to Grazer that they join forces. (Jagger, who learned so much from Brown, has been making his own film about him—collaborating with Alex Gibney on a documentary.) Grazer and Jagger hired Tate Taylor, a white Southerner, who directed “The Help” (2011), the soft-grained movie about black servants and white bosses in early-sixties Mississippi.
Taylor’s involvement turns out to be a mixed blessing. Altering the Butterworths’ screenplay, he has attempted to elevate the standard tropes of a Hollywood bio-pic into a radical new form. As Taylor shows us, James Brown had a terrible time as a child. Abused and beaten by his father (Lennie James) and abandoned by his mother (Viola Davis), he grows up in Depression-era rural Georgia, under the protection of Aunt Honey (Octavia Spencer), an all-seeing woman who runs a brothel, and who tells him that he’s meant for greatness. His mother, before she left (for unexplained reasons), told him the same thing. These solemn predictions give a corny, quasi-mythical aura of destiny to a triumph that was actually built on talent, hard work, daring, and opportunism; if anyone was self-made, it was James Brown. But Taylor can’t let go of his pretentious design: imitating Alain Resnais and other modernist directors, he dissolves linear narration, plowing backward again and again, giving us more Southern-gothic moss—often when we’re most fascinated or appalled by Brown and would rather not leave the moment to search for the root cause of his behavior. Didn’t anyone tell Taylor that you can’t explain a phenomenon like James Brown any more than you can explain Mozart?
As Brown, Chadwick Boseman is sensational. In “42,” he played Jackie Robinson, who could make history in the major leagues only if he ignored the race-baiting snarls from other players and from the stands. Boseman’s lionlike eyes conveyed some of what Robinson went through, but, except on the field, the performance never took off physically. He conquers all restraint in “Get On Up.” Thirty-seven years old, he assumes the role of Brown as the performer turns seventeen, squeezing his words into the young Brown’s strangled, high-pitched blur. (Eddie Murphy said that he never understood a word Brown said.) Acting with his arms and his shoulders—Brown’s body wasn’t yet fully liberated—Boseman makes him a little overeager: a young man with a killer smile and enormous charm, especially when he wants something from someone.
Brown and a group of other young musicians, obsessed with the impassioned style of Pentecostal gospel music, form a group called the Famous Flames. At the demand of a booking agent, Ben Bart (Dan Aykroyd), and a record producer, Syd Nathan (Fred Melamed), the name of the group is changed to James Brown and His Famous Flames. The rest of the band is furious, but Brown agrees. He makes everyone, including his friend and musical collaborator Bobby Byrd (Nelsan Ellis), address him as “Mr. Brown.” At first, the formality seems a hipster joke, a way of announcing that he has arrived. But Brown takes it very seriously, and also fines anyone in the group who plays a wrong note or does drugs—any drugs, including marijuana. He insists on respect from whites, too, but, in Taylor’s apparently ironic telling, Brown’s ways with black musicians become increasingly domineering and egotistical. The situation grows worse when Brown starts making millions but denies his salaried musicians base pay and taunts them into quitting.
As Brown’s music moves from gospel to rhythm and blues (and later to funk), audiences go crazy, and Boseman reveals what success does to Brown’s body. The smile is no longer welcoming; it’s sharklike, a demand for recognition. Offstage, Boseman gently swings his torso as he walks, as if Brown were teasing the sexual opportunities that are open to him. He enters a room with his head slightly turned; he has his own angle on what’s going on, and won’t submit to anyone else’s. He does look directly at Bart, a fond and protective music pro, but otherwise he’s distant and impersonal, a man incapable of acknowledging anyone who isn’t a member of his audience.
Onstage, in blue silk, and with abundant ascending hair, Boseman in one continuous motion grabs the mike, drops it, pulls it back by its cord, and launches into “Night Train.” The beat is driving, constant, even ferocious, but Boseman’s movements are liquid. A spectacular dancer (the choreographer Aakomon Jones worked with him), he does Brown’s swivelling side to side, his scissoring splits. To my eyes, his performance is both accurate and a marvellous interpretation, an extension of Brown’s greatness. The filmmakers give us plenty of music-making: the famous night at the Apollo, in 1962, which became a hit album and brought Brown to national attention; the 1964 T.A.M.I. Show, filmed at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, in which he blew the Rolling Stones off the stage; and the Paris concert of 1971, when he performed three stunning numbers—“Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine,” “Super Bad,” and “Soul Power.” In a rarity in these bio-pics, the movie captures a musician’s shifts in style. Rehearsing, Brown teaches his rebellious backup band to emphasize rhythm rather than melody. “Every instrument a drum,” he says, and persuades the horns to play, in unison, a single chord. Funk takes shape before our eyes, with hip-hop beckoning down the road.
The presentation of Brown’s music is extraordinarily generous, and I have only one quarrel with it. Brown made records from 1956 almost until his death. The filmmakers transferred all the recordings to a different digital format, adding some new sounds and deleting some old ones. These versions tame the rawness of the original records, particularly the early ones—the incomparable assault, aimed at your heart and your body, that leaped out of radios, loudspeakers, hi-fi equipment. Grazer, Jagger, and Taylor (and probably a host of sound technicians) undoubtedly wanted clarity and dramatic emphasis. But, no matter how you heard it, James Brown’s music was devastating, and it shouldn’t be plumped and smoothed. Brown helped create the contemporary taste for rawness in popular music; it’s what people have always loved him for. ♦
