Your Movie Library
Cast
- Gary CarrBuddy Bolden
- Michael RookerPat McMurphy
- Ian McShaneJudge Perry
- Yaya DaCostaNora Bolden
- Ser'Darius BlainWillie Cornish
- Reno WilsonLouis Armstrong
- Kelvin Harrison Jr.Frankie Dusen
- Erik LaRay HarveyBartley
- Robert Ri'chardGeorge Baquet
- Karimah WestbrookAlice Bolden
Recommendations
- 63
RogerEbert.com
The result is sometimes dizzying, enchanting or confounding, but it is certainly never boring. - 60
Los Angeles Times
Unfortunately, the film, costarring Erik LaRay Harvey, Robert Ri’chard and Ian McShane, turns overly violent, raw and showy, undermining the glorious music (written, arranged and performed by Wynton Marsalis), superb period re-creation and Carr’s powerful lead turn. - 60
The Hollywood Reporter
Since the lead character is effectively a mystery man, some lack of grounding is appropriate. Unfortunately, the impressionism — the improvisation, you might say, of this particular life (mirroring, one supposes, Bolden's approach to music) — is so dominant that it finally proves a crutch. - 50
Variety
Pritzker and Rothschild’s script feels like such a composite of jazz biopics that its only in the performance sequences, parceled out stingily amid the misery, in which Bolden really comes alive. - 40
New Orleans Times-Picayune
What we end up with is a film that contains many fine moments -- the young Bolden's discovery of rhythm, an imagined discussion on musical improvisation between Bolden and clarinetist George Baquet, a look at racial politics of the day -- but those moments don't quite coalesce into a consistently satisfying whole. - 38
Observer
Most filmgoers will come away only mildly convinced of Bolden’s place as jazz’s inventor and even less sure that the movie they just saw spun a coherent or compelling narrative.
