‘Anthem’ Review: Flying High

“Anthem” opens with a series of archival scenes from American history: from John F. Kennedy’s 1961 address championing space travel to Barack Obama speaking about the necessity of dissent; from members of the Ku Klux Klan waving the American flag to the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol; from the Black Power protest at the 1968 Olympics to Colin Kaepernick taking a knee on a football field. The montage strikingly illustrates the idea that nationalism can take wildly different forms that have little to do with national symbols.

Yet the film that follows seems to miss this point. Peter Nicks’s documentary follows two Black artists, the film and television composer Kris Bowers and the record producer Dahi, as they embark on a road trip with the goal of creating a new anthem that — unlike “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which borrows from a British tune — feels homegrown and representative of America today. Their naïve belief that a song can make people of all stripes, even those persecuted by the country, feel included reminded me of the celebrity “Imagine” music video from March 2020. It feels like lip service that doesn’t confront the real issues.

Bowers and Dahi’s journey is fascinating: they explore blues in Mississippi, country music in Tennessee and Native drum circles in Oklahoma, accumulating a melting-pot portrait of American music. Yet their conversations are gratingly anodyne, invoking platitudes like “truth,” while the visuals insipidly jump between screens, close-ups of faces and slow motion shots of the two on the road. Any thorny moments, as when a singer from a military family clashes with an immigrant vocalist over questions of national pride, are brushed aside too quickly. Where the film’s archival footage demonstrates the limits of respectability politics, “Anthem” ends up being overly respectable — and inevitably reductive.

Anthem
Rated PG. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. Watch on Hulu.