Director Matthew Heineman has made a name for himself covering warzones in narrative film (A Private War) and most prominently in documentary (City of Ghosts, Cartel Land). I don’t blame him for stepping back just this once and making a movie about a charming musician and his rise to zeitgeist prominence. The film is American Symphony about Jon Batiste, a soft lob of a tribute that somewhat perversely is the film that could very well win him an Academy Award. Even documentarians can follow the same tried-and-tested path. I just wish I liked it more.
Batiste is 37 years old. American Symphony doesn’t say this stat outright as far as I recall, but it goes to great pains to make the audience very well aware that he is some sort of wunderkind. A Juilliard graduate who landed a big break as bandleader on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and then shocked people by winning four Grammy Awards including Album of the Year as well as an Oscar for the original score to Pixar animation Soul.
I’ll be honest when I say I don’t know if I fully “get” Jon Batiste. I spent much of the documentary’s 104 minutes being a bit perplexed as to how he managed to become such a prominent name—although one very brief moment of cultural reflection suggests that perhaps he hasn’t; is he actually more of a niche talent than the cultural phenomenon the rest of the movie tries desperately to show us he is? I think perhaps therein lies my issues with American Symphony: it is so utterly convinced of its subject’s status as one of the new, modern American greats that it largely forgets to show us why. Everybody that he and the film interact with is in such complete and utter dumbstruck awe of him and I felt as if I was going mad.
Even his partner, writer and activist Suleika Jaouad, through what is theoretically the doc’s most emotional and compelling sketches, constantly looks at him with dew-eyed wonder and admiration. That we’re too often showed Batiste winning awards and getting standing ovations while she battles cancer in hospital over any real meaningly observations from her makes it particularly hard to latch onto.
None of this is helped by what observations we do get. Passed to us through narration that bears the tortured scars of being heavily scripted. Batiste and Jaouad often speak in vaguely inspirational riddles, skirting around the thornier edges of a life and career that goes largely unexamined. I’m mostly thankful we’re saved from the monotony of talking heads, although maybe they would have perked the film up and allowed the viewer to learn more about the man that he himself is willing to show us. One less scene of his band or his friends or just other musicians telling us he's a genius while he stands right next to them might've been appreciated. American Symphony becomes brand-service pretty quickly, his feelgood nice guy showmanship grating to a similar degree as his raw musicianship and talent makes me want to dance (when we get to hear it).
That the titular American Symphony goes largely unseen and unheard is also disappointing, although it’s easy to imagine once grand plans got thrown into disarray by the diagnosis of Jaouad. Even though that, the film tries—successfully, but to what end—to suggest Batiste’s life is the real symphony. Fine if that’s your directorial thesis, but it’s not a very interesting one to not show the notes beneath the sounds (to use a poorly thought out metaphor; hey, I’m not the genius here!). The sheen and the gloss that has made me question the integrity of Heineman’s other documentaries is here in double, slickly packaged for Netflix. The credits staying up just long enough for the Oscar-qualifying original song to play in full only to shrink away once its over. As a documentary, it doesn’t come across as very interested in Jon Batiste. As a biography of Jon Batiste, it seems to focus on all the wrong things.
Release: Streaming worldwide on Netflix.
Award chances: Definitely an Oscar frontrunner if if can get the nomination (which seems likely).