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As we’re all making New Year’s resolutions, we can use some inspiration. Here are a few documentaries about three groundbreaking, boundary-pushing, rebellious Black artists who gave everything to pursue their artistic impulses—and left sometimes complicated legacies.
‘Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters’
There is a startling scene in Can You Bring It when famed choreographer Bill T. Jones, who is helping a group of college student dancers stage his 1989 work D-Man in the Waters, realizes why he’s not seeing the right emotion coming through the performance. The young dancers may understand intellectually that the piece is about Jones’s own dance company coming to terms with the AIDS crisis, which was laying waste to their community at the time. But they can’t relate to it on a visceral level, as that crisis is an abstract, historical footnote to them. He finds he must explain to them what the fear, confusion, and grief was like—a startling fact for anyone who was there and felt like nothing could ever eclipse it—and also challenges them to find ways to relate to it for themselves. After all, they have been through plenty of world upheaval and destabilizing danger in a post-9/11, school-shooting-plagued world. This is the crux of a film that shows us how art is passed from one generation to the next.
Where to Watch: Amazon Prime
‘Little Richard: I Am Everything’
You’ll see the rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Little Richard in a whole new light through this documentary, which is (almost) as thrilling as watching his famously electrifying performances. Examining the star through more modern lenses of racial politics and queer theory, director Lisa Cortés reveals an icon who was decades ahead of his time. High-wattage interviewees and archival footage show how pioneering he was—in his sound, his look, and his identity—and how influential. (Bassist Nile Rogers, for instance, explains that David Bowie wanted to sound how Little Richard looked, a factoid that’s hard to forget, even though Bowie perhaps accomplished a little bit of both in his own ways.) Little Richard’s life was a bundle of contradictions: He was Southern, religious, iconoclastic, queer, a rock god, and a genius. And his legacy is best understood from the distance of time and through this skilled film.
Where to Watch: Apple TV+
‘The Picture Taker’
This Independent Lens documentary tells a story gripping enough to be a feature film, but restrained to the rigors of truth required by real nonfiction storytelling—which makes it all the better, since everything here is genuine, don’t-have-to-factcheck
Where to Watch: PBS
Tom Hurwitz’s Acceptance for ‘Can You Bring It?’
“Can You Bring It is a film about making art and love in the face of catastrophe and death,” co-director Tom Hurwitz said. “The man who brought us through it is Bill T. Jones. He’s one of America’s great creators and great souls.”
Where to Watch: PeabodyAwards.com