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August 3, 2014

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Home » Sunday » Film

Boseman dazzles in Brown biopic

By Jocelyn Noveck | August 3, 2014, Sunday | Print Edition

THERE’S a delicious moment in “Get On Up,” Tate Taylor’s new James Brown biopic, when Brown — played by Chadwick Boseman, in a thrillingly magnetic performance — is about to appear on the T.A.M.I. Show, a multi-act concert filmed in 1964.

Backstage, the singer is informed he and his band won’t be closing the show; that honor will be going to an up-and-coming British band called the Rolling Stones. Brown shakes off the disappointment, goes out and blows the roof off the place with the force of those growling vocals and explosive, kinetic dance moves. Then he saunters over to the Stones, four skinny blokes who don’t know what hit them. “Welcome to America,” he says.

Did he say that in real life? No matter. Like many scenes in the film, it expresses Brown’s most important qualities: his indescribable drive as a performer, and his almost blinding charisma.

For that, kudos go to director Taylor and producers Brian Grazer and Mick Jagger (yes, that Mick Jagger, who’s made no secret of Brown’s influence on his own famous moves.) But none of it would work, of course, without Boseman, an actor on a remarkable run of late, playing Jackie Robinson in “42” and now this. If he was impressive as the dignified Robinson, he’s electrifying as Brown.

And just as Brown, in life, upstaged pretty much everyone — including his bandmates, the Famous Flames — Boseman does the same here. The always excellent Viola Davis plays Brown’s mother, Susie, but since Susie left her son as a young boy, we don’t see enough of Davis — just a few sad moments from Brown’s rural youth, and then one wonderfully played scene later, when she comes to see her adult son backstage.

The central relationship in Brown’s life, though, was with his friend and partner, Bobby Byrd, who stuck with him even as Brown’s ego pushed many away. As Byrd, Nelsan Ellis gives a thoughtful performance that grounds the film.

Many biopics of performers follow a grating formula: Tough youth, obstacles overcome, fame discovered, more obstacles, descent into old age or worse. Here, Tate and screenwriters Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth avoid this by jumping around in time, ditching chronology for a thematic approach. It can get confusing, but it works.

The music sounds fabulous throughout. One imagines Jagger had something to do with that. The vocals are Brown’s; the dance moves, that’s all Boseman.

In the end, we have a portrait that is not uniformly positive, yet falls mostly on the kinder side. At one point, Byrd is trying to explain to a bandmate why he sticks with Brown.

“He’s a genius,” Byrd says.

Hard to argue with that.

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