Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown
Alex Gibney has to be the most prolific documentary filmmaker currently working. Gibney moves between polemic examinations of topical issues and well-thought out profiles of artists. This year Gibney has already turned out Finding Fela, an absorbing portrait of the Nigerian music superstar. His latest doc chronicles the life of James Brown with an eye to the cultural contributions Brown brought to the music arena as well as the social and background of the times.
Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown hits some of the bullet points the recent Universal biopic Get On Up touched on while going deeper into Brown’s attempts at garnering popularity by courting politicians. One clip shows Brown at the podium with a stumping Hubert Humphrey, the two of them singing, albeit briefly, together. Yet another clip shows Brown firmly in the Nixon camp. Brown thought that endorsing Nixon in the ‘70s would increase his audience. While politics always makes for odd bedfellows a truer trajectory of Brown’s soul can be seen in the sounds he created.
Brown could takes the same couple of bars of music and make that the entire song. His initial hit “Please, Please, Please” was groundbreaking in the sense that it consisted of the same words over and over. Among the talking heads is Mick Jagger (also the producer) who recounts how The T.A.M.I. Show went down. The concert movie was shot over a period of days in 1964 on then high-resolution video cameras and released immediately into theaters. The Stones may have closed the movie (the way it was edited) but Brown stole the show. One archival clip shows Brown performing in Boston in 1968 after the assassination of Martin Luther King. When fans jumped onto the stage Brown calmed down the crowd and the police, the latter who were definitely on edge. There was a part of Brown’s off stage personality that was dedicated to social change.
Other testimonials include Chuck D., Bootsy Collins, and Danny Ray who was the member of Brown’s troupe that would place the cape over Brown’s shoulder in the singer’s stage show finale. Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen are among the performers who borrowed James Brown moves.
Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown premieres tonight on HBO with additional play dates throughout October and November.
— Michael Bergeron
