ELLY GRIMM
• Leader & Times
The funk music group Sly and the Family Stone was a juggernaut during the 1960s and 70s, producing such hits as “Everyday People” and “Stand!” among many others before breaking up in 1975 due to drug issues and other issues between the original band members.
Recently, Oscar-winning director Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson (who some might remember directed another one of my past review subjects, “Summer of Soul”) released his newest documentary, “Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius).” The film focuses on the band's rise, reign and subsequent fall while also shedding a spotlight on the unseen burden that comes with success for Black artists in America.
I’m not what you would necessarily call a mega-fan of Sly and the Family Stone, so I’m not quite as familiar with their music as some other artists, though I’ve heard some of the group’s music occasionally on the radio while driving through town. However, I absolutely loved Thompson’s “Summer of Soul” documentary from a few years ago, and I figured it would be another winner, which ultimately proved a good prediction.
To start off, Thompson definitely has another great documentary to put on his résumé, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see him pick up some hardware next awards season because his overall care and passion are evident throughout the entire movie. I also found it very interesting how he was able to take such a broad topic (the unseen burden that can come with such quick and massive success) and narrow that focus by using Sly and the Family Stone’s story as an example and also making sure viewers get a full picture of what happened. One of the movie’s producers, Joseph Patel, said in a Forbes interview “Part of our job was to figure out what was real and what was myth and how much of it we wanted to focus on. I think, had we made this film 20 years ago, it'd be a different movie. But we didn't want to focus on all the negative stories ... We weren't getting too nerdy and we weren't getting too superficial. We found the sweet spot for the story we wanted to tell,” and I feel like the movie was able to so just that.”
While being subtle, I also found the movie to be a good portrayal of the pitfalls of such sudden and massive success and becoming almost too big to fail. There’s a point in the movie where David Kapralik, the group’s former manager, talks in a voiceover about how close Sly was with contemporaries Elvis and Bob Dylan and The Beatles in terms of popularity, and how that doesn’t even scratch the surface of just how big the group was in its heyday. In the aforementioned Forbes interview, Patel says “ ... The bigger story of this film, it's about Sly, but it's also about this burden that comes with success. Specifically, the burden for Black artists and the way they're treated in this country. And when we kept going back from his peers now, and then going back generations, we considered Sly to be the first who really had to navigate pleasing both white audiences and Black audiences.”
That all also plays into how the movie is also kind of a commentary on overall celebrity culture and how celebrities are held up to nearly impossible standards and values, only for those same people to almost celebrate when there’s a public stumble. How many stories are there in history about past child starts who found massive overnight success only to flame out after they’re basically told they aren’t cute anymore and don’t have a strong support system for afterward? Artists deserve the space and grace to experiment and fall and just be human without the eyes of the entire world on them, which was unfortunately not granted to Sly, which is shown through some footage and newspaper clippings about his various arrests and court appearances.
I also really enjoyed how there was also a focus on just how influential Sly and the Family Stone’s music was on not only his contemporaries at the time, but then later on with up-and-coming artists such as Janet Jackson. Artists from both eras are interviewed in the movie, such as Andre 3000, Chaka Khan, George Clinton, Q -Tip, among many others, and it’s pretty astonishing to me just how much influence the group had on almost everyone around them back then going into now.
Much like “Summer of Soul,” Thompson also used a lot of home video and archive recordings throughout the movie, and I absolutely enjoyed that and how much texture it added to the movie and story. I can’t even begin to wonder how much time and energy it took for all of that footage to be restored, and my hat is off to the people in charge of that aspect of the movie.
Overall, I very much enjoyed “Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius)” and would give it a solid “A” grade. The movie is an absolutely solid piece of work, and director Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson did a great job taking such a broad topic and using this story as an example to help prove his point. The movie does a great job portraying not just how rough the entertainment industry can be for artists, but also how rough overall celebrity culture can be. The movie is celebratory and somewhat heartbreaking at the same time, and Thompson is able to strike that balance really, really well. My only minor gripe is I wish there would have been some sort of update included about how Sly Stone himself is doing nowadays, because I feel like a lot of people, particularly fans, are wondering the same thing. I hope this film gets some hardware during the next awards season, because it DEFINITELY deserves some love. If you’re a fan of music history or Sly and the Family Stone, this will definitely be a good one to cue up on Hulu or Disney+
