United Kingdom/Ireland | 24 October 2014 | Written and Directed by John Ridley | Starring: André Benjamin, Imogen Poots, Hayley Atwell, Ruth Negga, Burn Gorman.
With the huge successes of Ray in 2004, Walk the Line in 2005, the recent release of Get on Up and the dozens of music biopics already in the pre-production stages; it seems there is an irresistible urge for film studios to cash in on the legacy of some of music’s biggest icons. Although these icons are usually superbly impersonated, the films themselves begin to resemble one another as they trace the familiar arc of the rise and fall of a great artist’s life. However, unlike the ‘cradle to grave’ stories chronicled in the Ray Charles, Johnny Cash and James Brown biopics, independently produced Jimi: All is By My Side concentrations solely on the events of 1966, when James Marshall Hendrix was transformed from an aimless session guitarist playing New York bars into an electrifying frontman at the height of the blues-rock scene of Swinging London.
It all started six years ago when Academy Award-winning 12 Years a Slave writer John Ridley was searching for Hendrix rarities on YouTube. Listening to one busted studio take after another, he came upon “one of the most emotive, powerful pieces I’d ever heard. . . The title of the song was ‘Sending My Love to Linda.’ I was like, ‘Who is Linda? And why is he writing this song?” It turned out to be Linda Keith, the then-girlfriend of Keith Richards who introduced Hendrix to the London music scene and to his new manager Chas Chandler (plus LSD), as well as developing his iconic style.
Ridley began to understand how much Linda (played by Imogen Poots) and Kathy Etchingham (Hayley Atwell), the long-term girlfriend whose part in their tempestuous relationship provided inspiration for several Hendrix classics, had an effect on the guitarist’s development and their influence became central to the story. The women play their characters fantastically and it is a joy to watch the charming and proper Poots mentor the mild-mannered shy Hendrix, whist the contrastingly fiery and volatile Atwell appeals to the guitarist’s energetic on-stage persona.
Ridley goes some way to suggest that it was the people surrounding Hendrix who nurtured and shaped the rock icon he became, however, the ideal casting of André Benjamin keeps the rockstar at the film’s magnetic core. Over the past decade, Benjamin, better known as André 3000 (the other half of hip-hop duo Outkast) has been working on his own personal transformation from rapper to actor, playing various supporting roles in films like Be Cool, Semi-Pro and Four Brothers. Though by taking on the demanding role of Hendrix, Benjamin has finally proven he can be taken seriously.
Ridley noticed that with Outkast, Benjamin demonstrated immense onstage flamboyance while still remaining fundamentally introverted; a clear quality that the rapper shared with Hendrix. Benjamin studied all the available footage to perfect the incendiary performer’s silky voice; he worked tirelessly to learn to play the guitar left-handed, with his teeth and behind his back in true Hendrix fashion; and despite his striking facial resemblance to the rock icon, Benjamin was required to lose 20 pounds off his already slender frame. All the hard work certainly paid off, as watching this is like seeing Hendrix in the flesh. Benjamin has got the rockstar down to a tee, from his appearance to his mumbling mannerisms. For all the film’s flaws, André is certainly not one of them.
So what about those flaws? Perhaps the most disappointing aspects of the film is that it contains none of Hendrix’s original music, so unfortunately for the diehard Jimi fans, you won’t be hearing “Purple Haze”, “Hey Joe”, “Voodoo Child” or any other Hendrix hits that remain ’60s counterculture signifiers more than four decades after his death. For years, the Hendrix estate has refused the rights to the legendary music to filmmakers, which put most of them off the idea of making a Hendrix biopic. Except for Ridley, who decided he didn’t need the songs to tell the story and that this would be a more illuminating biopic about the man behind the music.
However, this brings us to further flaws, as Ridley’s attempt to paint a honest image of the rockstar falls just short of turning him into a narcissistic psychopath. The moment where Hendrix repeatedly beats Kathy with a pay-phone receiver is utterly shocking, not only in its brutality, but the entire act seems totally out of tune with the character’s overtly easy-going nature. The episode has also been fiercely denied by the real Kathy Etchingham, who claimed Hendrix had been an inherently gentle man and nothing of that kind ever took place. Sure, he had been selfish at times, but this sudden violent outbreak seems like it was placed there to simply create drama in an otherwise uncertain plot. Even if there was some truth to the domestic violence, by including it and presenting it in this way, Ridley immediately degrades an otherwise likeable and well-acted hero. Ridley may have been aiming to subvert the mythologizing tendencies of the biopic genre; however, the audience watches a Hendrix film expecting to be attracted to and inspired by the rock icon not alienated by him.
In fairness, a story-teller is inclined to look for some kind of darkness to make a narrative interesting, but unfortunately the film falls short on the inspiration front also. Although there are some triumphant moments, namely Hendrix’s upstaging of Eric Clapton at a Cream gig and the sublime, amped-up rendition of the Beatles’ ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’, the audience never sees a full development of Hendrix’s inventive songwriting abilities. Linda Keith raves about him from the word go, but the film fails to offer any depth in to why and how he made it from slumming it in New York to rocking out on the world’s biggest stages.
This brings us back to the absence of Hendrix music, as one can see how it would be a challenge to present Hendrix’s genius songwriting without his actual songs. As a substitute, session guitarist Waddy Wachtel, drummer Kenny Aronoff and bassist Lee Sklar produced some original music replicating the sound of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, inspired by unrecorded tracks and general Jimi-jamming; which is fine, but the absence of the iconic riffs is noticeable and frustrating. Although it was the early stages of Hendrix’s career, the likes of “Foxy Lady”, “Can You See Me”, “The Wind Cries Mary” and “Purple Haze” all featured on the setlist at the Monterey festival where Jimi performs at the end of the film. So the seminal songs were indeed in the slipstream, just unfortunately they couldn’t be touched by Ridley and his crew. The Clapton upstaging and the Beatles cover are the two most entertaining episodes of the film, but there is nothing surrounding these moments that suggest that this is one of the greatest musical minds that ever lived.
There are a lot of great things to take from this film, specifically the intriguing character relationships and some compelling dialogue with the odd bit of humour, all mixed into woozy jump-cut visuals which gives the film a hallucinogenic feel, certainly appropriate to the time period. However, overall André Benjamin’s efforts have been wasted here. Fingers-crossed that by the time a director with a different vision manages to secure the rights for the Hendrix songs, Benjamin isn’t too old to reprise his role, as despite the short-comings of the character Ridley has given him, there still is no one more ideal to play the mighty Hendrix. Despite his ambitious and admirable attempts to break the conventions of the genre, it seems that Ridley doesn’t really know what story he wants to tell or how he wants to portray its hero, and without the music, any Hendrix story is going to suffer.
Jimminy Critic 