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Charles Bradley. (Courtesy HIFF)
REVIEW BY GENE PARK / Special to the Star-Advertiser
A 62-year-old man, who reads about as well as a 5-year-old can,releases his first album, and it becomes a critical and commercial hit. Unbelievable? Sure, even to the man in question, Charles Bradley.
‘Charles Bradley: Soul of America’Sound x VisionHawaii PremiereScreens at 8:45 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 18, at Regal Dole Cannery |
“Charles Bradley: Soul of America” is about soul revival. It’s less about his revisionist Motown 2011 debut album, “No Time For Dreaming,” and more about how this poor black man came up from a broken home and squalor, and transitioned gently into the kind of life he’s always wanted to live.
At first glance, “Soul of America” seems about as uninspired as a James Brown impersonator, which is what Bradley began his career as. The film begins with him putting on a wig. Impersonators are fun, but tacky. But these are people with dashed hopes and dreams too. Bradley puts a face to the often untold stories of these impersonators.
As a child, Bradley’s mother abandoned him in Florida for New York. She reappeared later in his life, and it’s heavily implied that she snatched him away to New York for welfare support. Yet Bradley is now 62, paying for all of her bills. He still lives in Brooklyn projects, and when things “get too crazy” in his neighborhood, he runs to mom’s house and sleeps in a mildew-stained basement with a single mattress. It’s a vivid portrait of poverty that is both sad and heartwarming.
This story becomes the core of Bradley’s transformation from a mere caricature to a fully-formed individual artist. This transformation happens over pumpkin-flavored beer (which Bradley is both fascinated and not impressed by), and extended conversations with the Daptone Records’ crew, especially songwriter and bandleader Thomas Brenneck. Bradley says all he knew how to do was to get up on stage and perform. Brenneck teaches Bradley how to channel his painful history through powerful music.
Director Poull Brien shot this documentary with the kind of introspection and analysis that usually comes with already-established singers. Bradley is barely established, but that’s besides the point for now. Brien recognizes in Bradley a compelling story about the here and now, where all the players, including Bradley’s misguided, fragile yet still loving mother, can be interviewed, dissected and captured.
The film never becomes a promo for the album. The story is always about Bradley and his life and pain. When he’s finally made the big time, the camera still finds time to find Bradley tickling his mother. Moments like that make this film worth sitting through. Moments like that probably make Bradley’s life worth living through as well. And the music? I want to buy the album now. I guess it’s not a bad promo after all.
“No Time For Dreaming” debuts, and ends up as one of Rolling Stone magazine’s best albums in 2011. At the end of the film, Bradley stands at the airport, about to embark on a journey that would have him perform 110 shows in 17 countries in the following year. But it’s that face he gives off camera — that wrinkled smile you give when you’re about to tear up — that says it all. Even Bradley finds all this hard to believe.
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