Movie Review: ‘Get On Up’

“You’re gonna have to give him a moment, son. Dewey Cox needs to think about his entire life before he plays.” – Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story

You’d think after Walk Hard ripped into the whole “music biopic features a scene with the aged performer thinking about his/her whole life before taking the stage” conceit that music biopics would stop doing it. It’s especially silly when the performer has to walk through a dark, empty backstage area before taking the stage when anyone who has ever been backstage at a concert can tell you there is usually a flurry of activity behind the scenes. While Get on Up, the biopic of the “Godfather of Soul” James Brown, has one of these scenes, it actually starts with a hilarious, high-energy scene featuring the aged James Brown (Chadwick Boseman) brandishing a shotgun and an employee that used his private bathroom.

Yet this high-energy scene is a false start because while Boseman turns in the performance of a lifetime as James Brown, as evidenced by the scene mentioned above Get on Up falls victim to the many cliches of music biopics. Boseman’s insane energy, outrageous costumes, and funky hairstyles are all pitch perfect, but he’s trapped by the movie’s attempt to be crowd-pleasing rather than daring.

Get on Up follows Brown’s life from when he was a child up until the age of 60 in 1993, though it skips over 1972-1988. While jumping around the timeline it follows Brown’s troubled youth (he was essentially raised in a brothel by his aunt after his mother abandoned him), his rise to fame, his friendship and falling out with close collaborator Bobby Byrd (Nelsan Ellis), and also briefly touches on his criminal and drug problems later in his life.

Despite their prominent placement in advertising, both Viola Davis (who plays Brown’s mother, who abandoned him) and Octavia Spencer (who plays Brown’s Aunt Honey, who takes him in) have small roles in the film. In fact, both Dan Aykroyd (who plays Brown’s manager, Ben Bart) and The Office‘s Craig Robinson (who plays a saxophonist in Brown’s band) have much bigger parts. Of course, Get on Up was directed by Tate Taylor, so it isn’t a surprise that the names of him, Ellis, Davis, and Spencer are all over the advertising so it can be promoted as “from the director and stars of The Help,” even if that’s not entirely true.

One of the major narrative problems with Get On Up is that it skims way too much of Brown’s life, and because the narrative structure jumps around  too much there are numerous major plot points that are glossed over or just dropped completely. Early in the film we see Byrd quit Brown’s original band the Famous Flames once the record company wants Brown to be the face and name of the band. However, he’s later shown back in the band with no explanation. Later, it’s mentioned that Brown is having tax trouble with the radio stations and restaurants that he owns, though these were never mentioned before. Again, this plot thread is dropped without any followup, so his tax problems must have magically disappeared. Perhaps most unforgivable is when the film references the 1973 death of Brown’s son Teddy, which only merits a passing mention as Brown spirals into drug use. Not only is neither Teddy’s death or Brown’s drug use (which was reportedly substantial in the years the movie skips over) explored in depth, but earlier in the film the death of Bart is portrayed as devastating to Brown as if he lost a father — even though the film never establishes them as having anything more than a close business relationship

Most surprising to me is that the film really doesn’t focus on the most important part: the music. Sure, there are plenty of performances, and as I said Boseman makes an incredible James Brown, but we find out very little about how Brown developed his unique sound or how he developed his skills as a musician. So while we see the fruits of his labor, there is really only one scene (when Robinson’s character questions Brown on why the band is playing in different keys) that shows Brown developing his influential sound. A modern audience will likely not walk out of the film understanding how much influence James Brown really has had as a musician, though Boseman’s performances at least demonstrate Brown’s influence as an energetic performer (even if the film never really demonstrates how often Brown toured — usually more than 300 shows a year — that gave him the nickname “The Hardest Working Man in Show Business”).

All that boils down to what’s wrong with the film: it’s a paint-by-numbers musical biopic that throws in a dash of everything (performances, deaths, paranoia, betrayal, domestic violence, drug use, crime, sex) that is completely carried by Boseman’s performance as Brown. Honestly, to me it seems that the screenwriters Jez and John-Henry Butterworth (along with a story credit for Steven Baigelman) watched Ray and Walk the Line and then just followed that formula for Get On Up.

By the way, there are at least six jokes in the film about how white people aren’t funky and can’t dance. They’re funny at first, but after a while it gets silly — particularly a incredibly nonsensical scene with two white squares (played by John Benjamin Hickey and Allison Janney) getting their groove on in a hotel where James Brown’s band is playing. This is in spite of the fact that later in the film there are plenty of white musicians in James Brown’s band. It’s one of those easy jokes that gets tired after a while, particularly since (as I pointed out) so much else about Brown’s life was cut out.

While Get on Up fulfills its mission to spread the gospel of James Brown, it’s far too incomplete to register as a classic among music biopics. It’s a shame that unlike Brown, the film itself couldn’t do something unique and inventive because the movie is frequently hilarious and Boseman works his heart out (as do other actors, like Ellis, and Brandon Smith, who plays a very effeminate Little Richard). It will end up having its fans, but unlike Brown himself it won’t be considered a classic.

Rating: Though Chadwick Boseman is unbelievably good and the movie is sometimes hilarious, Get on Up is too derivative of other music biopics (6/10).