Bitchin’: The Sound and Fury of Rick James (2021)

(On Cable TV, September 2021) I’m not going to pretend I knew all that much about Rick James — sure, I knew the music (“Superfreak”), sure, I knew about the later-life memes by way of David Chapelle. But the rest… not so much. So, I was ideally primed to see Bitchin’: The Sound and Fury of Rick James, which asks James’ friends and family to take a look at his legacy ten years after his death. The opening is surprisingly cinematic, as they open his storage unit years after James’ death, and start looking at memorabilia. What follows is, in many ways, a familiar story: a capable artist reaching heights of fame and being consumed by drugs and excess, sinking back into obscurity before a later-life pop-culture revival. The film is, as is often the case with friends-and-family docupics, somewhat sympathetic to James — many of the less-savory events of his life (say, the kidnapping and assault charges) are barely touched upon and while his drug use is condemned, it’s always paired with the weird quasi-admirative relationship everyone has with “the rock-star lifestyle.” That does temper the fun of the rest of the documentary, which features quite a few of James’ best-known numbers, a cogent overview of the musical genre he was working in and some amusing stories about his relationship with Prince. There’s even a detour through Toronto at a culturally important time, as James evaded the US draft during the Vietnam War. Much of this exhilaration comes falling down in the film’s second half, as drugs take over his life (including a disastrous TV performance) and almost certainly hastened his early death. While Bitchin’ certainly does not make a saint out of its subject, it does make the too-familiar biographical trade-off of privileging access to interviewees over a completely honest presentation. That kind of decision is increasingly untenable in an environment where you can fact-check documentaries by a simple Wikipedia check. The result is not a bad documentary: writer-director Sacha Jenkins assembles a documentary that’s reasonably entertaining throughout. But it’s missing some crucial content, and that makes it difficult to recommend it wholeheartedly. Any viewing should be accompanied by some judicious fact-checking.