The best biographical motion pictures tell the story of a someone’s life the way we imagine they would tell it themselves. Ed Wood plays a little like a movie directed by Ed Wood, if he had a lot more talent. American Splendor appropriated the conversational and confessional style of comic book writer Harvey Pekar. And Get On Up goes to great lengths to recreate the unmitigated funkiness of James Brown, a musical icon with more showmanship than could normally get crammed into a single film.
Director Tate Taylor tries, and damn near succeeds at adapting that crackling, rhythmic energy of James Brown’s life in a movie that nobody, I suspect, thought Taylor had inside of him. His previous film, The Help, was a gooey and intensely problematic melodrama – despite some fine performances – that established the filmmaker as a sincere but uninteresting storyteller; for better or worse, he simply got out of that movie’s way. But in Get On Up, Taylor seems to have developed a genuine groove all his own, sampling the most interesting parts of James Brown’s life and mixing them up for maximum effect. Moments appear out of chronological order simply because they’re more interesting that way, and James Brown repeatedly breaks the fourth wall to let you know that he’s running the show, and you’re in good hands.
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How lucky for us, then, that Taylor’s approach works and that he’s cast a particularly funky Chadwick Boseman as James Brown. As with any actor who recreates a singular personality, Boseman is forced into imitation, adopting the unusual voice, style and physicality of a performer with whom we all (I hope) are closely familiar. He gets those parts just right and uses them to infuse Get On Up’s more personal moments with Brown’s ineffable presence, presenting even the most familiar of biographical story beats – Fame goes to his head? Surely you can’t be serious! – with a theatricality that feels real, whatever the actual reality of his might have been.
James Brown always seemed larger than life, and Boseman’s revelatory performance preserves that image, allowing Get On Up to capitalize on our shared familiarity with the man, his music and his persona. Since getting bogged down in all of that was the other option, this was certainly the right way to go. Get On Up is the movie we imagine it should be, crackling across the screen with a beat you can damn near dance to. It’s got all the energy Jersey Boys lacked, crafting an immediate connection with the audience to take us deeper inside the story. Its affect is its substance: if it looks good, and it sounds good, and it feels good, then it’s pretty darned great.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
