Dominated by a familiar parade of well-worn musicians — Gene Simmons, Alice Cooper, Keith Richards — the documentary “Chuck Berry” is almost exactly the opposite of its subject. Staid and conventional, this mostly chronological trot through Berry’s career highs and criminal lows leaves you wondering how such a fluent talent (he died in 2017) could be so discordantly repurposed.
Leaving aside its cheesy, colorized dramatizations, Jon Brewer’s movie offers a strangely bifurcated portrait. On one hand — in interviews with Berry’s wife of almost seven decades, Themetta Berry, and three of his four children — there’s the devoted provider. On the other, the capricious artist, chronic womanizer and repeat offender, his more disturbing legal problems smoothly explained by his lawyer, Wayne Schoeneberg, as some combination of misunderstandings, racism and overzealous law enforcement.
Failing to fuse the two, Brewer turns to the music, beginning with the 1955 release of “Maybellene” and the subsequent appropriation of Berry’s songs by rising British groups like the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. That’s far from the only way that Berry and other Black artists of the time were exploited, but “Chuck Berry” mainly holds its nose and sidles past payola and other music-industry scandals. In archival concert clips and footage from Taylor Hackford’s 1987 documentary on Berry, we see an incandescent, yet inconsiderate and controlling performer, one so accustomed to being cheated he regularly demanded his fee in cash before a performance.
Yet the man Steven Van Zandt jocularly suggests was the “original hip-hop gangster” never quite comes into focus.
“He was a poet,” says his eldest daughter, Ingrid Berry, the movie’s most openly grieving heart. She deserves the final word.
Chuck Berry
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. Watch through Film Forum’s virtual cinema.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
