Butler's Cinema Scene

Sharon Jones

“MISS SHARON JONES!”   My rating: B 

93 minutes | No MPAA rating

Barbara Kopple made her reputation with hard-hitting, left-leaning documentaries like “Harlan County, U.S.A.” and “American Dream.”

But she also has a long history of music-themed films, including “Wild Man Blues” (Woody Allen’s Dixieland jazz band), “Shut Up & Sing” (the post-9/11 Dixie Chicks) and “Woodstock: Now & Then.”

“Miss Sharon Jones!” is about a musician, but it’s really not about music.  Rather, Kopple uses her cameras to record singer Sharon Jones’ battle with pancreatic cancer.

Jones, who was once told by a recording exec that she was  “too old, too fat, too short, and too black,” has recorded several albums, one of them Grammy-nominated.  But her career rests on her heavy tour schedule with the Dap-Kings, her nine-member interracial backup band.

For Sharon Jones in action is a sight to behold.  She swaggers, she sways, she gets funky, she dances, and she has a voice that absolutely shreds r&b and soul numbers.

Jones during chemo…

For her on-stage theatrics and raw power she’s been called “the female James Brown,” and the concert footage provided by Kopple justifies that  comparison.

Up there on stage Jones is absolutely in charge.  But an encounter with cancer can humble even the most confidant personality.

Let me say up front that Jones overcame her illness and is back to performing. So “Miss Sharon Jones!” has a happy ending. Don’t stay away because you hate grim outcomes.

But it’s the story of her fight — the friends and fellow musicians who surround and support her — that makes the film so compelling.

We’re there when Jones has her head shaved in a pre-chemo pre-emptive strike.  When it’s all she can do to drag herself out of bed. When she puts on a positive front for medical staff and fellow cancer patients.

And the film deals as well with the fallout of her illness on her fellow players.  Sidemen who rely on an unending tour schedule to pay their mortgages face big questions. Do they stick with Sharon and hope for the best? Get a new, more-or-less guaranteed gig?

On one level the doc is a study of how a life-threatening illness affects a family…albeit a family linked not by blood but by music.

The resulting film is fiercely musical and deeply emotional.

|Robert W. Butler