John Ridley is the guy who wrote “12 Years A Slave” and the guy I’ve simply assumed would really not do a good job on the Jimi Hendrix biography “Jimi: All Is By My Side” , especially since he didn’t have the rights to any of Jimi’s recorded material. Plus, Andre 3000, half of Outkast, is a great musician and an alright actor on occasion but surely not good enough to portray Jimi. Plus, the entire movie has been mired in controversy, still living participants unhappy with their portrayal, and the whole thing went straight to VOD.
But really, it isn’t that bad. The weakest part is the music, which isn’t there really. They obviously should’ve crafted a real band behind Andre to play the music, the way they did near the end during a performance of “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”. But if that is huge and a real distraction, by narrowing his focus to Hendrix’s breakthrough year, 1966, Ridley manages to bypass the clichés of rock bios and boil it down very clearly down.
In 1966, Jimi was performing as Jimmy James and The Blue Flames when Keith Richards girlfriend Linda Keith (a lovely Imogen Poots) saw in him something no one else did at that time, stole Keith’s guitar and gave it to Jimi. Her interest in Jimi began a trajectory that lead the legendary guitarist to manager Chas Chandler (of the Animals), Carnaby Street and London, a career making turn at Saville Theatre in front of two Beatles, and finally a trip to Monterey where the legend would begin in earnest. The movie ends with Jimi at Heathrow Airport about to enter the history books.
If the urge is to suspend disbelief when watching a movie, this won’t do it. Despite the afro, Andre doesn’t look much like Jimi, and while he has the voice and body movements down, and gives a fine performance, he doesn’t have Hendrix’s lethargic sensuality, his uncoiled physicality. Andre gives a vision of Hendrix (pre-heroine Hendrix by the way), as a sort of don’t harsh my vibe hippieguy, a psychedelic quasi-sound visionary whose spark of rage at his longterm girlfriend is especially shocking since it seems to go so hard against his peaceful nature.
Jimi, during this year, is something of a cipher and where small parts of whoever he really is seem out of place, they both illuminate and cloud whoever Hendrix was. A collect call Jimi makes to his father is properly devastating with his father infuriated at the waste of money, an act of incredible racism by the friendly British Bobbies as Jimi walks with his (white) girlfriend is properly disturbing, and a brilliant scene where Hendrix argues with Michael “self-styled black revolutionary and civil rights activist in 1960s London” X is a showstopper –“things won’t change till we say no to the love of power and yes to the power of love” is Hendrix’s reply to X’s black baiting.
Is it real? If you have ever seen Hendrix’s Saville Theatre performance and compared it to Andre’s, there is an element of cool sharpness to Jimi that Andre can’t get to. In the quieter moments he isn’t bad but at the bullhorn no messing moments, he just doesn’t get there. Perhaps it is ego, a sort of muted self-understanding of Jimi’s powers that doesn’t come through.
It also doesn’t do what we most want it to do, tell us what Jimi was REALLY REALLY LIKE? In a very late scene with Linda, Jimi says “The things that you love, they stay with you, whether you want them to or not.” Where is Jimi in that statement?
History has it that Jimi was a quiet, easygoing guitar fanatic, you would never see him without a guitar, he played constantly and that isn’t a mystery but it is nearly impossible to show, it just is. Jimi couldn’t get to the heart of relationships not because he was a rock star who could talk to millions but not to one, but because he was a music guy who was unformed without his instrument. I had a friend once who claimed musicians were the most boring people in the world because all they cared about was playing music. Perhaps you need that obsessiveness to be a musician, and that is the heart of the Hendrix story, that image of him sitting and playing for himself, for someone else, any time, everywhere, it is where he lived.
Jimi’s death was an accident of life, it wasn’t like Cobain killing himself, an extension of his art form (it wasn’t even an OD) so you can’t take anything from it, it might add to the mystique but it doesn’t add to the history. The history is one wrapped sideways into the 60s and psychedelia, Jimi’s sort of insistent wide yet blurry eyed innocence. Andre isn’t like that. Andre is a 21st century hip hop guy and in his Jimi is an edge Jimi seemed to forego. People think of Jimi as the giant putting his axe on fire in the middle of the stage but if you look at him, he is the OCD obsessive, with the long fingers, plying themselves and bending themselves and these huge sounds nobody ever saw coming. Ridley says, this is what happened just before he hit it big, but it doesn’t fit right with whoever we know Hendrix to be.
The riddle of Hendrix is not a riddle, all great musicians have a hole somewhere. We have glimpses of his youth, of what he left behind, and what he was doing, his nonchalant coolness to everyone, but we don’t have the image of what he was. Perhaps there is no way to find Jimi, where his love lives pn, outside the music.
Grade: B
