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Harry Belafonte is a great performer and a great activist. This reverential documentary emphasizes the activism.

B Musical & political documentary

Directed by Suzanne Rostock

My mother was a big Harry Belefonte fan. She loved his singing voice. She very much approved of his political activism. And I suspect she found him very sexy. There were reasons for those tight pants and v-necked shirts.

Director Susanne Rostock clearly likes Belefonte, as well. Her biographical documentary, co-produced by Gina Belafonte and a company called Belafonte Enterprises, makes no attempt to show his warts. The picture celebrates the actor/singer’s talent, and even more, his activism.

Luckily, it’s a life worth celebrating. Born in Harlem and raised partly in Jamaica (the Caribbean Jamaica, not the one in Queens), Harry Belefonte started acting as a young adult. Then he discovered singing, and found fame and fortune with a singing style all his own. But as a black man in post-World War II America, he soon grew disgusted with the segregation that kept him down despite his success–and kept less successful African Americans further down still. He became an outspoken critic of racism and segregation, and soon became an important figure in the civil rights movement, working closely with Dr. Martin Luther King. He’s still an activist today, working to reform gang members and against a legal system all too eager to jail young people of color.

Rostock tells all this in her film–or more precisely, she allows Belefonte to tell it; the subject of this doc is also its narrator. Their picture encourages you to burn with anger at the world’s injustices, and admire those who worked and sacrificed to end those injustices.

But if you come into the theater because you love Belefonte’s music, you’ll be disappointed. You’ll hear bits and pieces of many a great song, but you won’t hear a single one from beginning to end. I understand this is primarily a political biography and not a concert movie, but let’s be honest here. American history is filled with heroes and heroines who devoted their lives to making this a better world, and many of them paid a far greater price for their ideals than did Belefonte. Yet Rostock chose to make this picture about Belefonte. Why? Because he’s a talented and famous singer. Giving us a few complete songs would have resulted in a longer film, but it would have also turned an interesting political polemic into a must-see movie.

I have one more complaint–this one technical. Much of the picture is taken up by old, pre-HD television clips, shot in the old 4×3 aspect ratio. Rather than pillarboxing these images (putting black bars on the side of the screen to maintain the original framing), Rostock chose to fill the entire screen with every shot. Sometimes, she crops the shots vertically–not an ideal choice but a workable one. But other times she stretches the image horizontally, distorting the picture and making everyone look fat—as you can see above.

Rostock and Belefonte have made a flawed documentary that’s still worth seeing. They could have made a much better one.

Sing Your Song opens Friday at the Roxie.

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A

My wife and I caught Nowhere Boy Saturday night. I went in knowing a considerable amount about John Lennon’s life. I went out knowing a whole lot more about how his emotional makeup. Or at least more about how some very talented filmmakers assume his makeup to have been.

For those who haven’t heard, the film concentrates on Lennon in his late teens (Aaron Johnson) and his strained relationships with the two mother figures in his life—his birth mother Julia and the aunt who actually raised him, Mimi (Anne-Marie Duff and Kristin Scott Thomas, respectively). This is a portrait of the future artist as a very angry young man. Since Julia proved unable to handle the responsibilities of parenthood, her sister Mimi raised John from the age of five. Although she lived within walking distance, Julia made no attempt to contact her son for many years.

She comes back into his life early in the film, and the sparks fly. While Mimi seems the very embodiment of the uptight, stiff-upper-lip Brit, Julia is wild, carefree, and apparently brimming with a zest for life. At least that’s the first impression. Married now with young children, she often seems to be flirting with her own son.  She also turns him onto rock-and-roll.

Screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh and director Sam Taylor-Wood treat John’s growing musical ambitions, appropriately, as a subplot. They’re interested in a teenage boy’s relationship with his aunt and mother; the fact that the boy will become rich and famous in a few years is beside the point.

Taylor-Wood wisely keeps Beatles references at a minimum. The opening few seconds echo the start of A Hard Day’s Night. The Liverpool folk song Maggie May—heard briefly on the Let It Be album—turns up a couple of times. In one scene we see John and Paul writing a song together, but it’s “Love Me Do” (the only early composition of theirs that they recorded and released). Early rock by performers like Screaming Jay Hawkins and Wanda Jackson dominate the soundtrack.

This is, to my knowledge, the third dramatic film about the Beatles and John Lennon. The first, a horrible TV movie from 1985 called John and Yoko: A Love Story, deserves to be lost. As the name implied, it was about his second marriage. The second film, the very good Backbeat, concentrates on the early Beatles’ days in Hamburg, and Lennon’s friendship with Stu Sutcliffe. Now the excellent Nowhere Boy studies his relationship with his two “mums.” Seems like each one is better than the last.

Now someone has to make a truly great film about the relationship without which none of us would have heard of John Lennon: his collaboration with Paul McCartney.

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