Dan DeLuca: New 'Jimi' biopic doesn't need Hendrix songs to rock out

What are the essential ingredients of a compelling music movie?

Maybe the most overrated one: Music.

It's hard not to come to that conclusion after seeing Jimi: All Is By My Side, John Ridley's unconventional, tightly focused movie about the most virtuosic rock guitarist of all time. You feel it even more sharply with more conventional music biopics, such as Get On Up, the James Brown saga that was briefly in theaters this summer. Too many music biopics begin to resemble one another as they trace the familiar arc of the rise and fall of a great artist's life.

Jimi is a different story. It's anchored by startlingly good performances by André Benjamin (better known to most as André 3000, one half of rap duo OutKast) as Jimi and English actress Imogen Poots. She plays Linda Keith, the British model and then-girlfriend of Keith Richards who saw Hendrix with R&B journeyman Curtis Knight in New York in 1966 and helped bring Hendrix to the world's attention.

Ridley, who won the best adapted screenplay Oscar this year for 12 Years a Slave, wrote the script and directed. The story smartly zeroes in on the year Hendrix spent in England on the brink of superstardom. He did so at the urging of Chas Chandler, the bass player for the Animals, who was his first manager. Stardom arrived after Hendrix set his guitar on fire at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967.

That's one of the most iconic stage gestures in rock history. And you won't find it in Jimi, just as you won't hear "Foxy Lady," "Purple Haze," "The Wind Cries Mary" - or any other Hendrix songs that remain '60s counterculture signifiers more than four decades after his death.

That's partly because the filmmakers did not secure the rights to the music from the guitarist and songwriter's estate, which is run by his sister Janie. For years, Experience Hendrix L.L.C. has refused permissions to would-be moviemakers unless they agree to the company's "full participation."

But it's also because Ridley didn't need the songs to tell his story.

"I had an idea that I would do it like this," the writer-director said this year at the South by Southwest film festival in Austin, Texas, where Jimi had its North American premiere.

"It was always going to be one year in a life. Not driven by artifacts, or particular songs. It was driven by emotion, and things that were undiscovered, like the Saville Theater performance," in which Hendrix boldly opened his show with the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," with Paul McCartney and George Harrison in the audience. "It was meant to be upbeat, rather than just waiting around for this tragic end."

Ridley, who has written for TV (The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air), as well as film (Three Kings, Undercover Brother), was scouting locations for American Crime, his ensemble dramatic series featuring Felicity Huffman and Timothy Hutton about the impact of a murder on a community. It will air on ABC in 2015.

He was also fresh off winning his Oscar. "To be only the second person of color to win that award - there's a lot of weight that goes with that," he said. "I hope I earned it, and I hope I live up to it."

One night about six years ago, Ridley was working late, searching for Hendrix rarities on YouTube as he wrote. Listening to one busted studio take after another, he came upon "one of the most emotive, powerful pieces I'd ever heard. . . . And I was like, 'What is this song? How come I never heard this?' The title of the song was 'Sending My Love to Linda.' I was like, 'Who is Linda? And why is he writing this song?' "

Linda turned out to be Keith, the Vogue model who lent Hendrix her boyfriend Richards' white Stratocaster after being wowed by his playing. (Richards later teamed with Brian Jones to write "Ruby Tuesday" about her.)

Finding his focus, the director had raw material for a quiet music movie, wonderfully edited by Hank Corwin and Chris Gill, that feels as though it's eavesdropping on history made in dark rooms, like the one where Eric Clapton angrily says to Chandler, "You never told me he was that good!" after Hendrix sits in. It makes us see Hendrix in a new light, a remarkable achievement considering how endlessly his musical corpse has been picked over.

That's possible in part because the movie belongs just as much to Keith, though she's off screen for long stretches. "Look at this incredible woman," said Poots, also interviewed in Austin. "She was a catalyst in his career. It's really about this dynamic where, as a young artist, you need somebody to support you, somebody to motivate you."

The unexpected, off-kilter approach stands to yield better biopic results in an information age in which actual footage of the artists being impersonated - however well - is available with a keystroke.

When Gary Busey turned in his star-making performance in The Buddy Holly story in 1978, by contrast, Holly had been dead and gone for two decades and there was no Internet to look him up on. If you were hungering to see "Peggy Sue" performed, Busey was the best you could do.

In Tate Taylor's Get On Up, Chadwick Boseman had a much more difficult job, trying to inhabit Brown in a movie that, thanks to high-powered producer Mick Jagger, benefited from having rights to the Godfather of Soul's original recordings.

No matter how energetic Boseman was, he could never be as electrifying as the real Mr. Dynamite. For proof, all you have to do is check out the T.A.M.I. Show performances on the James Brown YouTube channel.

Jimi: All Is By My Side is far from a perfect music movie. The songs included are mostly covers - Muddy Waters' "Mannish Boy" and the Troggs' "Wild Thing" - with Benjamin moving his fingers while Los Angeles session man Waddy Wachtel does the actual playing. It never rises to the level of being truly, shall we say, Hendrixian.

That's forgivable because the songs move the story forward well, and because Jimi is not really about the music. It's about the people who made it, and the ones whose lives were changed by hearing it. Besides, if we simply want to hear "Purple Haze" again, we don't have to go to the movie theater to do it.

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@delucadan

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