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Like The Man Himself, 'Get On Up' Is A Livewire

Universal Pictures
Chadwick Boseman (center) as James Brown and Day Aykroyd (right) as Ben Bart in 'Get On Up.'

The new movie Get On Up describes the life of soul music master James Brown. The film celebrates genuine eccentricity and an uncommon personality.

Get On Up devotes a lot of energy to avoid being labeled a Hollywood musical biopic, which, of course, is exactly what it is. But the picture keeps trying to stay fresh by displacing the material that’s grown repetitious.

Everybody’s seen stories of a singer who rises from a background of poverty and abuse. It’s a cliché, but it’s also true a lot of the time – and Brown came from that kind of childhood.

It’s also no surprise that for most of his career, Brown had a white manager, Ben Bart (Dan Ackroyd). Black singers in the ‘50s and ‘60s often had white managers and most of the time those managers took all the money. Bart didn’t, but to shake up these overcooked elements, Get On Up fragments its story and jumps between different times in Brown’s life. It scrambles the expectations and makes it possible to steer through the formulas.

This is an awkward, unruly movie, but it stays lively. The movie also doesn’t quite adore James Brown, which is another smart move.

The picture opens in 1983 with a dull-eyed white man in drab business clothes and glasses leading a dreary succeed-in-business seminar in a rundown strip mall. It was one of Brown’s ill-advised schemes. In mid-event, the volatile Brown shows up outside the store front with a rifle. He barges into the meeting; the customers hit the floor – and Brown suddenly and randomly harangues one poor woman because she’d used the bathroom.

Right off the bat Brown makes you nervous.

As a musician and performer, James Brown was good and is still influential – Mick Jagger is a producer of the movie. Brown was a delirious showman, and you can see where Jagger gets some of his onstage stuff. Brown sings and dances then moans and collapses. Handlers rush to cover him with a cape and help him up. He’s also arrogant – band members have to call him Mr. Brown – although he generally calls them Mr. also. He can be manipulative and insulting, like a cult leader.

It’s hard to tell where James Brown is coming from – and the movie works that angle. He’s cruel one moment and kind the next. During the war in Vietnam, he cozies up to President Lyndon Johnson and looks like a smarmy sell-out. But then, in Boston the night Martin Luther King is murdered, Brown calms an audience itching for trouble. He drops his onstage character and becomes a serious adult who knows how to handle the crowd. The documentary Gimme Shelter, about The Rolling Stones infamous Altamont concert, shows how Mick Jagger could not rise to the occasion and settle an unruly audience.

Director Tate Taylor doesn’t really interpret or explain the tumult of chaos and genius that was James Brown. The movie just lays things out, so you get to marvel at how people become who they are.

Howie Movshovitz came to Colorado in 1966 as a VISTA Volunteer and never wanted to leave. After three years in VISTA, he went to graduate school at CU-Boulder and got a PhD in English, focusing on the literature of the Middle Ages. In the middle of that process, though (and he still loves that literature) he got sidetracked into movies, made three shorts, started writing film criticism and wound up teaching film at the University of Colorado-Denver. He continues to teach in UCD’s College of Arts & Media.
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