Get On Up (2014)

Get On Up arrives in 2014 as a sturdy, well-upholstered biographical musical, directed by Tate Taylor and carried almost entirely on the shoulders of Chadwick Boseman, who dances every step himself and sings over James Brown's own live recordings. The film shuffles its chronology, lets its subject address the camera directly, and otherwise follows the familiar arc from Augusta poverty to the Apollo to the strip mall and the shotgun. It is a performance showcase, and it knows it.

The cultural accounting here is largely inherited from the subject. A predominantly Black ensemble portrays a Black icon and the world that made him, and the film treats that as simple fact instead of a casting announcement, which is the correct instinct. Racial consciousness runs through the material because Brown's life ran through it: the Boston Garden concert staged the night after Martin Luther King's assassination, the plea for calm delivered to a restive crowd, the recording of "Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud," and Little Richard's roadside warning about the white devil. None of it is reframed for a contemporary audience. It is biography, and it stays biography.

The deficiencies are equally clear. Brown's violence toward his wives is staged and then abandoned, with no feminist reckoning attached to it; women function as mothers, aunts, and casualties. Little Richard appears and his sexuality goes unmentioned, a conspicuous omission. The music business chews up its artists and Brown fines his own salaried band for infractions, though the film never builds an argument out of it. There is no environmental content, no body positivity, no neurodivergence. The sermonizing is limited to a few earnest appeals for togetherness. The result is a handsome, occasionally electric portrait of a difficult man, content to admire the genius without auditing the era.