Ahmir K. Thompson aka "Questlove" is the Grammy-winning musician who is best known as being the drummer for the rap group, The Roots. He won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature at the 94th Academy Awards for his film, Summer of Soul (...or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) (2021). It was his directorial debut. He uncovered footage of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival and interviewed people who attended about the memories of the event, as well as the people involved who brought it to life. One of the performers at that festival and spotlighted in that film was the band, Sly and the Family Stone. Much like the Harlem Cultural Festival, there is a lot of African American history that has been forgotten or overlooked, despite how monumental or important the history is. What's revealed is that Sly and the Family Stone was a highly influential group. This film, therefore, is a kind of spinoff of Summer of Soul because it's basically a biography of Sylvester Stewart, the man known as Sly Stone and the main creative force behind Sly and the Family Stone.
Sly Stone is still alive, but he's now in his 80's and not in the best of health, so instead Questlove found an archival interview of Sly that looks like it was done back in the 1970's or 80's. Questlove uses that archival interview as the basis or foundation for this film. However, there are plenty of others, including other Black artists like D'Angelo, André 3000 and Q-Tip who speak to an even bigger point about what African American artists, particularly successful ones, have to do in order to navigate that success. Questlove is trying to nail down that navigation and how that navigation may or may not be different from their White counterparts. Sly Stone is essentially an avatar for that navigation.
Other than that, Sly Stone's story is important to catalog here because he is considered a musical genius in that he was a pioneer and he did things that no one else did. He didn't invent funk music, but he became an innovator in really defining it. Before that, Sly Stone was a Black artist who frequently collaborated with White artists. For decades prior to 1964, which is where this film starts, music groups or bands were mostly segregated, segregated by race and by gender. When Sly Stone formed the band that is Sly and the Family Stone, it was one of the few that was mixed-race and mixed-gender. In the same way, the members were conceived, so was the types of music used. Sly had mixed-music, integrating R&B, rock, psychedelic and various other genres.
Questlove proceeds to spotlight five of the group's biggest hits over the course of the decade that the group was in its height. This includes: "Dance to the Music" (1967), "Everyday People" (1958), "Stand!" (1969), "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)" (1969) and "Family Affair" (1971). There is a spotlight on their album There's a Riot Goin' On (1971), but there's a particular focus on those five, aforementioned songs. Questlove does something here that is rarely done and that is him depicting how those individual songs were created, meaning how Sly and his band were inspired to compose and record them, but also he shows how Sly's songs inspired other artists to create new songs.
What's rare is that Questlove breaks down how musicians specifically sampled Sly's music. We literally see the process of how young artists clipped or took beats or bars and interpolated them into new tracks. The process is underlined and emphasized in a way that feels fresh and incredible. Unless you are a musician yourself and unless you've worked in a recording studio, you might not understand the process. Questlove's film makes that process simple and clear for anyone to understand. His deconstruction of the sampling process is probably the most power thing in this film. We see this process specifically when music producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis talk about the creation of Janet Jackson's "Rhythm Nation" (1989) and it's probably my favorite part of the documentary.
Like any other music biopic, it charts the rise and fall of Sly Stone. The fall includes the typical drug addiction or substance-abuse spiral. So many music biopics or celebrity biopics in general have gone down that road. That part is predictable and easily can become boring. It's important to include because it's crucial to understand how he and other artists navigate the success. The fall also includes the intersection of racial politics, which is way more compelling than the drug addiction angle. Going back to the spotlight on There's a Riot Goin' On, that album came in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement and Sly not wanting to engage in politics. That album was a reflection of how he was under pressure from others to be more political. The film going into those dynamics was valuable.
Rated TV-MA.
Running Time: 1 hr. and 50 mins.
Available on Hulu.