For a movie about the birth of rock ’n’ roll Honeydrippers comes up sorely lacking in electricity
Sayles can’t make rock ‘n’ roll flick crackle
A movie about the struggles of a 1950s juke joint in Alabama and the beginnings of rock ’n’ roll should be exciting spirited and full of joy and music. When you’re dealing with the complexities of race relations in the American South and the electricity of new music there’s no excuse to churn out a dull film that becomes a chore to watch but somehow that’s exactly what John Sayles has managed to do.
Honeydripper follows a week in the life of Tyrone “Pinetop” Purvis (Danny Glover) the proprietor of a traditional blues juke joint that is swiftly losing steam and money. To save his club and his dignity Purvis books a hotshot rock ’n’ roller from New Orleans named Guitar Sam with follows Pinetop as he struggles with the law his booze suppliers and his wife Delilah (Lisa Gay Hamilton) to get the big night together. Ultimately his plan meets with some major snags but Purvis and his bartender Maceo (Charles S. Dutton) cook up a Plan B involving a handsome young drifter named Sonny (Gary Clark Jr.) who happens to have a homemade electric guitar.
While the plot is predictable (it’s pretty easy to figure out the ending of the film a good hour or so before it’s actually resolved) the biggest problem with this movie isn’t its flat storyline. Rather it’s Sayles’s apparent reluctance to hire a script editor. Clocking in at over two hours this movie could easily have lost a half hour and it’d still be too long. Sayles introduces us to plenty of secondary characters — some feuding cotton pickers Delilah’s tipsy boss (Mary Steenburgen) a hardline preacher and a ghostly blind blues player (Keb’ Mo’) — who don’t really add much to the story. Too many characters and too little plot movement make for muddy and confusing tangents that take away from any punch that the main storyline could have carried.
Worse for a movie about music there is surprisingly little rockin’ and rollin’ in Honeydripper . Aside from some blues at the beginning and the big rock ’n’ roll finish the audience doesn’t get much of a chance to dance around in their seats. More music fewer characters and more of a point would have saved this movie but as it stands Honeydripper is more of a snore than a rocker.
