James Brown gets a movie worthy of the Godfather of Soul.
Chadwick Boseman in Get On Up.
Universal Pictures
Get On Up, the new movie about the life of James Brown, begins the same way Walk The Line does: with its subject backstage, about to head out in front of an audience screaming his name. That subject, we're assured, is going to be super famous, even if it may take him a while to get there. Basically, he's worth sticking around for.
Of course, this is also the way Walk Hard, Judd Apatow and Jake Kasdan's brilliant spoof of musical biopics, starts ("Dewey Cox needs to think about his entire life before he plays"), so it's a little disheartening to see Get On Up open with the same musty set-up. As small a genre as the musical biopic is, it's dominated by a formula into which it tends to jam the lives of its performers — humble beginnings, early slog, rise to fame, addiction, downfall, and redemption. As Brown, played by Chadwick Boseman, struts toward the stage while whispers of "James Brown don't need no one" echo in his head, Get On Up seems set to follow that prescribed arc.
Chadwick Boseman in Get On Up.
D Stevens/Universal Pictures
Then something wonderful happens. Rather than take the expected step back into Brown's early days, Get On Up leaps to a hilarious, deadpan scene: It's 1988 and a drug-addled, fiftysomething Brown arrives at an Atlanta strip mall he owns, and discovers someone from one of the other businesses has been using his bathroom. He marches into the neighboring storefront full of people to deliver a rambling lecture about when people choose to schedule their shits, a discussion his audience is less than enthused about, since he's wielding a shotgun he accidentally discharges into the ceiling.
There will be no tidying up or solving of Mr. James Joseph Brown Jr., not in Get On Up, thank you very much. Writers Jez and John-Henry Butterworth and director Tate Taylor, whose last film was the considerably milder The Help, skip through the life of the Godfather of Soul with verve and shockingly little sentimentality, showing off the music legend's incandescent talent and commitment to his craft as well as his dictatorial side and tendencies to abuse the people who loved him, including at least one of his wives. Rather than trudge through Brown's biography from start to finish, Get On Up bounces from incident to incident in no particular order, creating a kaleidoscopic portrait of someone whose unstoppable drive to succeed was his best and worst asset.
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