Get On Up *** (2014, Chadwick Boseman, Nelsan Ellis, Dan Aykroyd) – Movie Revie

After directing The Help (2011), Tate Taylor helms this conscientious and smoothly made, if uninspired, movie about James Brown. It painstakingly chronicles the Godfather of Soul‘s rise from poverty and parental abuse and abandonment in a turbulent childhood to become a huge success as the world-famous tormented genius soul singer, supposedly the hardest working star in showbiz.

In lots of different wigs and various heavy make-up jobs, Chadwick Boseman does a very good, rather than brilliant job of portraying the singer at various different stages of his life. The wig budget alone must have cost half the whole movie! Putting in his bid for stardom, Boseman, already 36, works very hard to inhabit the persona of Brown, fighting the disadvantage of looking nothing like the funk star. The dance scenes look like a lot of hard work, but he puts a lot of energy into them.

Jez and John-Henry Butterworth’s screenplay is also well-crafted, rather than inspired, nipping backwards and forwards with the aid of captions, so that we thankfully don’t get an and-then, and-then chronicle. Not turning their back on useful, hackneyed showbiz clichés, they portray Brown in a warts-and-all way, and that’s part of the movie’s trouble – he comes over unsympathetically as a fiery, unpredictable, solipsistic so-and-so, who ditches all his friends and women, even beats them.

Happily, nothing stops the all-time great soul music, though, and all the hits are energetically and toe-tappingly staged, against careful period backdrops from the 1050s to the 1980s. The movie is entirely entertaining enough, but it seems a bit of a slim, slightly underwhelming saga extended over this long, 140-minute running time.

Dan Aykroyd does well as Brown’s manager Ben Bart, Nelsan Ellis scores as Brown’s buddy and band colleague Bobby Byrd, Brandon Smith enjoys a camp cameo as Little Richard, Viola Davis makes a little mark as Susie Brown, and Octavia Spencer impresses as Aunt Honey, who reluctantly brings him up. But the whole movie is on Boseman’s rather slim shoulders, and sometimes he’s struggling to carry its weight, especially when Brown becomes unlikeable and angry.

In some ways, it’s a sad and depressing story. But then if it were just a happy one, it wouldn’t make a very good film at all.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Movie Review

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