Review: Jimi: All Is By My Side
Jimi: All Is By My Side immerses the audience in a different Jimi Hendrix experience. Covering the approximately yearlong period (1966 - 1967) leading up to his unforgettable performance at the Monterey Pop Festival, the film is less a linear biopic and more a cinematic collage, impressionistic and free-flowing.
The Hendrix on display here is content to play his music and have his ambitions carried along by several people who would be key influences in both his personal and professional lives. There's Linda Keith (Imogen Poots), the posh British bird best known as Keith Richards's girl, who spots Hendrix playing at the Cheetah Club in New York City. They strike up a friendship and she sets about getting him seen by all the right people - The Rolling Stones' manager/producer Andrew Loog Oldman and CEO of Sire Records Seymour Stein among them - before convincing The Animals' Chas Chandler (Andrew Buckley) to take him on as a client.
Urged by Chandler to move to London, Hendrix moves from Linda to the brash and tempestuous Kathy Etchingham (Hayley Atwell). Their relationship plays out in parallel with his shambolic formation of the Jimi Hendrix Experience - drummer Mitch Mitchell secures the job via a coin toss - and his onstage persona. Kathy is soon usurped by the politically-minded Ida (Ruth Negga), a character based on the real-life Devon Wilson who introduces him to Richard X (Adrian Lester), who aims to open Hendrix's eyes to the racism of the times: "When [Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton] play the blues, it's acceptable. When you play the blues, you're a violent black abomination."
Throughout the film, Hendrix dusts away all attempts to label him and his music or navigate his career (even as he accepts the assistance). "I got no intentions," he tells Linda, "I seen how intentions do people. I'm not with that. I have my own thing and my own time and my own space and everything is beautiful." Writer-director John Ridley (the Academy Award-winning screenwriter of 12 Years a Slave) ditches the conventional narrative for something more hazy and evocative. Scenes are interspersed with still photographs and archival footage, audio drifts in and out of the dialogue, career milestones are mentioned but not particularly spotlighted. It's a flecked frequency on which the film operates, and it's not always an engaging one.
Ridley, like many other directors who tried to get the project offf the ground, was unable to secure the rights to any of Hendrix's original songs or recordings. So while we don't see the work and development that went into songs such as "Hey Joe" or "Purple Haze," we are able to see performances of "Killing Floor" as Hendrix impresses Clapton off the stage and "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" as Hendrix blazes through it with two of the Beatles in attendance. On balance, it's an effective workaround mainly due to André Benjamin's natural ease and physical manifestation of Hendrix's persona. In fact, it's an overall noteworthy portrayal that might be overlooked given the film's abstraction of its main character.
Jimi: All Is By My Side
Directed by: John Ridley
Written by: John Ridley
André Benjamin, Imogen Poots, Hayley Atwell, Andrew Buckley, Ruth Negga
