BEFORE: André Benjamin (André 3000? Which is it?) carries over from "Idlewild", and this is the film I've been looking forward to, they took their sweet time running this 2013 on premium cable. I know because I've been waiting for four years, since before there was even a Netflix to check obsessively. This will also cap off a trilogy of 1970's bio-pics this week, which included Linda Lovelace and John Holmes. Now, whatever happened to those Janis Joplin movies that competing studios were supposedly developing a few years ago, will any of those ever get produced?
I don't have many films left in this year's chain - and I can't make any changes now, not if I want to link to "Star Wars: The Last Jedi", which is now just five films away. But if I had an open slot, I could drop in a documentary about Hendrix that I recently taped - maybe I'll watch it anyway as an extra after this to verify the events in this movie. If needed.
THE PLOT: A drama based on Jimi Hendrix's life as he left New York City for London, where his career took off.
AFTER: It's the stuff of rock and roll legend, how Jimi Hendrix did a show in London with two of the Beatles in the crowd (Paul and George) and happened to have an advance copy of the "Sgt. Pepper" album backstage, so he quickly listened to the title track and went over the chords with the other members of his band, all so he could get ahead of the curve and be the first person to play a song from that upcoming album live in concert. Now, since that album had only been released three days prior, very few people in that audience were likely to recognize it, but for the few that would, hearing Jimi play it was really going to mess with their heads. Was Jimi trying to steal the Beatles' thunder, pay homage to their new album, or just blow their minds with a musical magic trick of sorts?
This did happen, there's a video of it online. Hendrix didn't get all of the chords right, and added an extended guitar solo, of course. But that's all we see of this concert in this movie, though Hendrix went on to perform "Foxy Lady", "Manic Depression", "Hey Joe", "Purple Haze", "The Wind Cries Mary" and "Are You Experienced". That's about when you realize that the filmmakers here weren't able to secure the rights to any of Hendrix's original songs, but they went ahead with the movie anyway.
To pull off their own little magic trick, they had to compose a few song pieces that sounded a bit like early Jimi Hendrix Experience numbers, and they were able to record Hendrix-like versions of "Wild Thing" and "Hound Dog", but other than that, there's a lot of footage of André as Jimi tuning up, or getting ready to play, or stalling within a recording session. Turns out you really do need some of those songs if you're going to make the point that Hendrix was a great guitarist, if not a great song-writer. But the film, in this roundabout way, then raises the question about his songwriting - was he just a great guitarist, in the end?
For these purposes, you have to examine his most famous tracks - "All Along the Watchtower" was a Bob Dylan song. "Hey Joe" goes back to Billy Roberts in 1962, and possibly before that. "Red House" came out of Albert King's 1961 recording "Travelin' to California", and so on. And the version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" he played at Woodstock would be completely out of copyright, of course. Rock has undergone a sort of revisionist history in the last few years, with musicologists pointing out that nearly every Led Zeppelin song was just a fresh take on an old blues song by Howlin' Wolf or Muddy Waters, so they've been forced to credit the real songwriters on the new releases of their old albums. Even "Stairway to Heaven" bears a strong resemblance to a song called "Taurus" from a band called Spirit, which Zeppelin toured with before they released "Stairway". Hmmmm......
So the film chooses to focus only on Jimi's time in London, which means it conveniently ends as he flies off to play at the Monterey Pop Festival, another iconic performance where he played some songs that he did write, which we'll never get to hear here. It's kind of similar to how "Wonderland" chose to focus on John Holmes' connection to a murder scene, rather than the x-rated film work that he was more famous for. And both remind me of Patton Oswalt's routine about "The Passion of the Christ", comparing a film focusing solely on Jesus' torture and crucifixion to an imaginary film about Albert Einstein that would focus solely on those three days where he had really bad stomach flu.
But for the positives, André Benjamin was great at capturing the speech pattern, the look and the FEEL of Jimi Hendrix. And even though he still had that "too cool" detached manner that was evident yesterday in "Idlewild", here that attitude really works, because I'm guessing that quite often, Hendrix WAS the coolest person in the room, and he knew it. It's too bad that the narrative and musical constraints here forced the story to add in a bunch of insecurity (to explain the overly-long guitar tuning sessions) and also the times he beat his girlfriend (which she claims never happened).
Also starring Hayley Atwell (last seen in "Cinderella"), Imogen Poots (last seen in "28 Weeks Later"), Ruth Negga (last seen in "World War Z"), Andrew Buckley, Oliver Bennett, Tom Dunlea, Adrian Lester (last seen in "Primary Colors"), Burn Gorman (last seen in "Layer Cake"), Amy de Bhrun (last seen in "Jason Bourne"), Clare-Hope Ashitey, Laurence Kinlan, Jade Yourell, Sam McGovern, Robbie Jarvis, Danny McColgan, Sean Duggan, Geoffrey Burton, Richard Lintern (last seen in "Syriana").
RATING: 5 out of 10 hair curlers
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