Movie Review: Get On Up

9/24/21

Wow. All I can say is wow. Honestly I can say that this film really deepened my appreciation for Chadwick Boseman’s work as an actor. For those who don’t know Chadwick Boseman was an incredible actor who starred as King T’Challa in the movie Black Panther, as well as the character Levee in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Jackie Robinson in the biopic 42. He passed away from colon cancer last year, and I remember feeling disbelief, not knowing how to react to his death, and then crying for about a week, just long sobs. I honestly didn’t think I was going to get through most of my days at work that week without crying. On television shortly after his death Black Panther was on, and afterwards there was a tribute to Chadwick, and seriously I was convulsing with tears and didn’t think I would sleep that night. I didn’t understand how life was going to be the same without Chadwick alive because in every movie I saw with him, he just put his heart and soul and feeling into the roles he played. And in the biopic Get On Up, it was like he was the only actor who could actually play James Brown, was meant to play James Brown.

This is also the first film I’ve watched starring Nelsan Ellis. Nelsan Ellis is an actor who was famous for his role in True Blood. I haven’t seen True Blood, but when I saw him in Get On Up, I was like, Damn, this guy could act. He plays Bobby Byrd, a member of James Brown’s band The Famous Flames. The movie shows how their rapport changes over time, and even when the other band members quit because James won’t pay them on time, Bobby stays behind and is the only member of the band to stick with James. That is, until he tells James that he wants to release his own record someday. In one powerful scene of the film, he and James are performing together, and James lets Bobby have some of his spotlight, giving him some credit when before he treated Bobby like any other member of the band. But when they’re sitting and talking together, Bobby tells James that he wants to release his own solo record, and James goes off on him and accuses him of stealing his spotlight and going around telling everyone he’s going to become the next big thing rather than stay in James’s shadow as he’s been doing the past something odd years they were performing together. Bobby quits because he can no longer take this anymore, and when he leaves Brown asks him why he’s leaving him alone, and Bobby tells him that from the very beginning James has always been on his own and wanted to do his own thing. This shows that he can see right through James, that even if James wants him to stay, Bobby knows that he worked behind the scenes with James for years, bolstering his career, hoping to one day launch his own career, but James isn’t going to return the favor or help him because he’s focused on his own career and his own success. Earlier, Maceo Parker, asks Bobby why he is sticking with James even though he treats the band poorly, and Bobby says it’s because he wasn’t meant to have the spotlight on him, and that James is the one meant to be in the spotlight. Maceo questions this logic, and we can see Bobby reflecting on whether he should stick with James or not. Even many years later in 1993, James thinks Bobby should perform with him again, even though Bobby has moved on and started a new life with his wife and family. The film shows how complex their relationship was, and Ellis and Boseman both did incredibly embodying the roles of both these people.

The biopic is also important to watch because of the theme of Black masculinity. We see several flashbacks to James’s childhood, when his father threatens to shoot and kill his mother and beats her severely. Another scene is when his mother is seen drunk and playing around with another man, and the young James calls out to her but she pretends to not remember who he is. Another scene is when James is talking with Little Richard during Richard’s shift at a burger joint, and Richard opens up to him about his past trauma and then asks James about his past trauma. James recalls a moment when he and several other Black boys were blindfolded and had numbers painted on their chests, and they had to fight in a boxing ring against each other in front of a crowd of white people. All the members in the band playing during the fight are Black men, and the camera flashes to their pained expressions as they look at the fighting. It shows the injustice of it all, because these Black men not only have to play music for white people but also have to witness young Black men learn aggression against each other for the sake of entertainment. They understand that these Black boys are being treated like chattel for the white audience. When James is knocked down, he looks at the band from where he is lying and they break out into a funk song and start getting into playing the music, and seeing this in his mind’s eye, even though it may not be actually happening in real life, inspires James to get back up and fight even harder against the other boy in the ring.

These flashbacks not only give a glimpse into what James’s life was like growing up, but it shows how he had to hide being vulnerable under all his success so that he wouldn’t seem weak. In one powerful scene of the film, his mother Susie comes by and tries to engage James in casual conversation, but James says he doesn’t want to talk to her because he doesn’t need her help anymore. His mother cries and explains that she did her best to raise him, and he gives her a $100 bill and shows her out the door, telling her to stop crying and getting sentimental because he is James Brown and he can make it on his own without anyone else’s help. When she leaves she says he is beautiful but he still gives her a hard cold expression. When Bobby appears, James appears to be crying, but he quickly wipes the tears away, suggesting that he doesn’t want to appear less than a man by crying. The scene made me think of the film Moonlight, and its depiction of Black male pain was told from a different lens because Chiron, unlike James, had homophobia to deal with on top of the struggles of being a poor Black youth. Towards the end of the film Chiron is sitting with his mother, who abused him when he was younger, and she is reflecting on her past behavior towards him and starts breaking down in tears because she feels she could have been more supportive of him when he was going through such tough times. When he sees his mother crying, Chiron breaks down and cries. This is a total contrast from the beginning of the scene where we first meet Chiron as a grown adult because at the beginning he is muscular, he works out, he’s no longer the skinny kid who got beat up by his crush in high school for being gay. He seems to be the prototype of the straight Black man, but the scene where he meets his mom shows that even as a grown man, he is a human being with feelings and that he doesn’t have to be ashamed of crying. We cry so we can heal from past trauma, and Chiron cries because he remembers his past and realizes he can’t keep it buried away no matter how much he tries to distance himself from his past. Him crying and sharing this moment with his mother of reconciling grief and trauma when he was younger allows him to truly heal and to express his humanity, his manhood, in a way that is true to himself, that doesn’t depend on societal expectations that say that men, particularly Black men, should keep their emotions to themselves and not share them with anyone.

James Brown actually had a song called “I Don’t Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing (Open Up the Door I’ll Get It Myself)” where he talks about not needing people’s charity or anyone’s help (“open up the door/ huh/ I’ll get it myself” is one of the lyrics). As groovy as that song was, it reminded me that asking for help, especially as a Black person living in a racist society, is perfectly okay, but also how historically Black people have been conditioned to pull themselves up by their bootstraps if they want to be successful. However, this mentality has only caused further pain and trauma because talking about mental health has historically carried a stigma in Black communities because of the idea that Black people, and Black men in particular, should just buck up and keep their feelings to themselves. It’s getting better and more people in the Black community are realizing that we need to talk about our mental health in order to go through the process of healing from trauma.

Also, side note: it was so interesting that Viola played the character she did, because in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, it’s totally different and this time, instead of being a supporting character like she was in Get On Up, Viola Davis actually plays a musician famous during the 1920s called Gertrude “Ma” Rainey. Boseman, in the film Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, plays Levee, who is a member of Ma’s band. Unlike Ma, who just wants to make her records and do her own thing, Levee caters to the white record executives and seeks validation from them for his work. He is constantly asking them to take his songs, and when they refuse he pretends to be okay with it, and then takes his anger out on his bandmates because as a young Black man living in a white supremacist society he doesn’t have many other outlets through which to express his frustration. He also challenges Ma a lot, underestimating her authority as a musician. Ma constantly puts him in his place though and reminds him that he needs to keep his ego at the door and just play the music how she wants it. It was interesting to watch Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and then Get On Up because I think Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom gave me some key context for watching Get On Up, particularly in regards to how Levee and James both handle their past trauma. In one scene Levee recalls how a white man assaulted his mother, and how witnessing her assault led to him feeling angry and disillusioned about life, especially life as a young Black man. Remembering that trauma with his mother also challenges Levee’s faith in God, and he points up to the ceiling cursing God and telling him to turn his back on him. I think that’s why, when I think about the last scene of the film, where a white band is seen recording Levee’s song, which the record executives at first rejected but then stole and sold to a white audience, because in that song there is a lot of pain and trauma underneath the joviality and upbeat nature of the song. Levee put his life into that song, and while writing it wrestled with his past trauma, his tense arguments with Ma and the other band members, so to the record executives, it’s just a song to be sold and distributed to the public, but within music there is the narrative of someone’s life, and Levee’s life, his suffering and brief moments of joy, went into that song.

In one scene of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, the white record executives are about to do a recording session with Ma, but she tells them that she won’t record the song until they bring her a Coca-Cola. This is just one of many demands that Ma makes, and it frustrates the record executives. But Ma tells one of the members of her backing band, Cutler (played brilliantly by Colman Domingo), that she knows that the white record executives only want her voice. They only want her voice, not her humanity, and they will do what they can to control her image to appeal to white audiences, giving her little to no artistic freedom or room to express her authentic self. This was common though at the time, and another example of someone who had to assert herself in the industry was Aretha Franklin. In a tribute to Aretha Franklin, Daily Show host Trevor Noah said that Aretha demanded to get paid before she performed instead of after she performed. She did this because she knew how white executives treated Black musicians, and in general because she was living in a racist society where Black people were treated as second-class citizens even in a prominent industry like the music industry, so she had to demand her pay and be assertive so that she wouldn’t be walked all over. In the film Ma didn’t care what other people thought of her, and she wasn’t trying to curry favor with the record label. She had a certain way she wanted to sing and express herself, and she came in with that self-knowledge, so she wasn’t duped into thinking that she had to do what the record labels said for her to do. Similarly, in Get On Up, James Brown makes several demands to his manger, Ben Bart, because he knows that if he signs with the record labels, these white executives are going to just make all the money they can off of him and not pay him well or treat him with respect, or even genuinely respect his artistry. Earlier in the film he has a conversation with Little Richard, who warns him of the “white devil” and to not let himself get easily duped by white people in the music industry. He remembers this advice and when he meets with Ben Bart, he tells him that he knows the “white devil” (aka the white record executives) just want to make money off of him, and he commands respect and makes demands of what he needs from them so he can launch his career and have complete ownership of his image. James suffered from mistreatment as a young Black man all his life, so he isn’t going to let white people profit from and take away the one thing he holds dear, his musical talent.

Overall, I really loved this movie. And Boseman’s dance moves were out of this world.

Get On Up. 2014. 2hr 19 min. Rated PG-13 for sexual content, drug use, some strong language and violent situations.