It’s Not Right, But it’s OK
Houston, we have a problem. In an attempt to keep singer Whitney Houston’s image a sparkling one, Kasi Lemmons’ biopic neuters her.
I Wanna DAnce With Somebody
Director: Kasi Lemmons • Writer: Anthony McCarten
Starring: Naomi Ackie, Stanley Tucci, Nafessa Williams, Tamara Tunie, Clarke Peters, Ashton Sanders, Dave Heard
USA • 2hrs 26mins
Opens Hong Kong January 5 • IIA
Grade: C+
In reality, there is very little that will take the shine off the late Whitney Houston’s legacy for Houston’s fans and, if we’re being fair, even detract from the grudging respect of non-believers. Girl could sing, and anyone arguing otherwise is being contrarian for the hell of it (see: Steven Spielberg). Also in reality is her well-documented and sad downward spiral into addiction, bad life decisions and tragic television appearances we still – inappropriately – giggle at. So no matter how rough a biopic would let her edges get, we’ll just quietly wonder how we let this happen and maybe marvel at how she juggled these identities. Or didn’t.
And let’s put this out there toot sweet: Kasi Lemmons’s by the numbers biopic I Wanna Dance with Somebody was co-produced by Arista Records overlord and Houston’s champion/label boss Clive Davis and former manager and sister-in-law Pat Houston among a couple of dozen others, and written by the nice white boy (Anthony McCarten) who wrote Bohemian Rhapsody – (almost) best known for its anti-analytical laundry job, in that case straight-washing (is that a thing?), which was also co-produced by former Queen band members. Sigh. When it comes to music bios, it seems curious viewers have two choices: often unauthorised docs or features lacking music rights (Stardust, Jimi: All Is by My Side), or splashy authorised features that play like nice, unchallenging, hagiographic Wikipedia entries. News flash: Whitney could have ingested every drug on the planet and drowned naked in a public swimming pool and she’d still have had one of the greatest voices ever. We don’t need a wishy washy biopic for that. We need one to better understand her demons, her insecurities, her creative process, her cultural cache.
A $10 billion teen
But whatever. What we get is another cookie cutter headline/hyperlink story, charting the roots, discovery, skyrocketing rise to fame, discomfort with fame, betrayal of origins, some kind of addiction, rehab, relapse and early death – sometimes only a brush with death and comeback. I Wanna Dance starts with young Whitney (Naomi Ackie, Steve McQueen’s Small Axe) belting out a gospel tune at church in New Jersey before being manoeuvred to “accidentally” audition for Clive Davis (Stanley Tucci) at the club where her mother, singer Cissy Houston (Tamara Tunie, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit) sings. In short order Davis has her on Merv Griffin – kind of the TikTok of 1980s television – and she’s off to the races. Coming along is her friend and eventual (oft disputed) lover Robyn Crawford (Nafessa Williams, Black Lightning), and her weaselly, strict and exploitative father John (Clarke Peters, The Wire, Da Five Bloods). You know where that’s going. Then, at the 1989 Soul Train Awards, where she got booed for not being “black enough,” she meets eventual husband Bobby Brown (Ashton Sanders, Moonlight), and the co-dependent downhill slide begins. In between the highs and lows, there are songs.
The film’s pre-ordained biopic structure keeps Lemmons, who was so visually creative and lush with Eve’s Bayou, tied to convention, similar to the one she deployed in 2019’s Harriet. How did she make a biopic about Harriet Tubman so blandly average? How did she make one about Houston so low-energy? Who knows, but Lemmons also gives in to her own worst impulses too often. The graceful closing shots of Houston gazing at herself in the mirror in her room at the Beverly Hilton the day she died, singing to herself with a weakened voice, fade to black and end her story on a sad note; one that makes you shake your head an say, “Too soon.” But wait! There’s more. We’re then treated to a recreation of Houston’s now-legendary 1994 American Music Awards performance – the whole thing. Sure. Who want’s to remember her as a broke down mess about to get in the tub and die. But that’s where the tragedy ends, regardless of what the film’s producers would prefer. And therein lies the genre’s fundamental conflict.
I Wanna Dance with Somebody isn’t entirely awful; in fact it’s not awful at all. It’s just rote. That said, unlike the dodge job of Bohemian Rhapsody, McCarten’s script acknowledges Houston’s queerness head-on, and the early sequences pivoting on the young women muddling through ambition and romance, together, are some of the film’s best. Same goes for Houston and Davis’s hilarious tête-à-tête regarding the script for The Bodyguard, and a shout-out to Kevin Costner (!) for being the one to tip her off to “I Will Always Love You”, the tune that pushed her from superstar to supernova. And it must be said, Ackie is consistently excellent, and captures Houston’s oddly uncool physicality and on-stage tics perfectly, but without a script that lets her dig into who Houston was, her performance doesn’t amount to as much as it could. When the film flirts with giving the push-pull-push between Houston’s affection for Crawford, her unhealthy attraction to Brown, possibly fuelled by a yearning for Black cred to the fore it just feels like a missed opportunity. That’s a good story. That’s the kind of tension that drives an artist and powers more thought-provoking documentaries. That’s the kind of tension that’s never going away; just ask Charley Pride, Living Color and Lizzo. I Wanna Dance with Somebody isn’t going to teach us anything about Houston, who indeed had it in her to be mercurial and prickly, so here’s hoping the volume in your cinema is turned up. The film was, after all, authorised. — DEK