The main thing I wished to grab hold of from a James Brown biopic was a facsimile of the incredible rush I’d received when I saw him live at The Arena in Philadelphia in the late 1960’s. Get On Up may not quite get all the way there there but it’s a more than adequate job given the Herculean task of an actor having to actually step into Brown’s iconic shoes and make magic. Chadwick Boseman (Jackie Robinson in “42”) has the added advantage he doesn’t have to actually sing since the film wisely uses original, remixed Brown recordings. As far as the intense choreography and urgency of Brown’s stage movements, according to my memories of Brown live and from film and TV takes, Boseman gets about three-quarters of the way there on the energy scale. Brown at his peak may have been the most intense live frontman in the history of pop music, so that’s no small feat.
Boseman adroitly navigates the various spans of James Brown’s myriad career. Director Tate Taylor, however, skitters around a bit too haphazardly in his flashback-and-then-forward-again hopscotching between the various phases. The film’s continuity is hardly neat and clean yet what Taylor lacks in cohesion, he makes up for in drawing up dramatic scenes from a decidedly self-reliant and courageous life. Brown was not only Mr. Dynamite on stage, but he was an instinctive entrepreneur, a creative if controlling perfectionist as a musical arranger, and an almost comical mess in his personal life. Get On Up cuts through the clutter with an earnest attempt to explain communication and personal relationship failures with juxtaposed scenes of Brown’s terribly sad and nightmarishly brutal childhood.
Abandoned by both parents, he went from a South Carolina sharecropper’s shack to growing up in a Georgia brothel, then spent nearly three years in jail for attempting to steal a man’s three-piece suit (he’d previously swiped a pair of shoes off a lynched man). The film connects the dots for us that Brown’s lifelong mistrust of people had an easily identifiable cause. When a middle-aged Brown is apprehended after a mad police highway chase scene, he finally gives up after finding himself cornered. The camera shifts from a plethora of cops with their guns cocked and pointed back to Brown’s stopped pickup truck. The adult man inside the truck who previously had been waving a loaded shotgun has suddenly transformed into Brown as a young boy (played alternately by the twins Jamarion and Jordan Scott).
Taylor also directed The Help and he again brings along Viola Davis (as Brown’s mom) and Octavia Spencer (as an aunt who runs the brothel), and some decently done emotional money shots. He makes sure Brown’s legacy doesn’t come in for too big a beating despite Brown’s practice of domestic abuse and his equally troubling bluntness toward his band mates, especially lifelong partner Bobby Byrd (Nelsan Ellis). There’s an admirable appreciation here for Brown’s fresh charisma and essentially smart worldview as his saving grace. He doesn’t always play nice but he usually plays real.
Now back to those live scenes. It’s all here: the groundbreaking early 60s Live At The Apollo shows, the riot-preventing post-King assassination Boston concert, the splits, the jumps, the twirls. We’ll have to wait for the forthcoming “Mr. Dynamite” documentary to fully show Brown in action, but Get On Up is a great start to acquainting yourself with the Godfather of Soul, the most sampled musician of all time (4,000 samples and counting), and a one-of-a-kind unforgettable genius, personal flaws and all.