There are two scenes, each indelible, that encapsulate the past and future that meet tentatively in 1950 Alabama in John Sayles' lighthearted Honeydripper.
In the first, Pinetop Purvis (Danny Glover) and his crony Maceo (Charles S. Dutton) have popped open the guitar case that has been the constant companion of a young mysterious stranger by the name of Sonny Blake (Gary Clark Jr.).
Inside is a guitar that doesn't look like a guitar and makes virtually no sound when plucked, and with it, a gizmo topped with vacuum tubes that looks like the inside of a radio.
They intuit what it is -- a boxy handmade solid body electric guitar -- and react with a mixture of scoffing and wonderment.
Sonny, meanwhile, has been "hired" to pick cotton by Sheriff Pugh (Stacy Keach), a characteristic Southern Sheriff who gets kickbacks from the plantation owners for rounding up folks with nowhere to go and putting them to work. There, we hear one veteran give advice on proper cotton picking -- mostly involving staying bent over to conserve energy.
The how-to sounds like advice on life in a society where knowing one's place is the key to getting along. Honeydripper is, on the surface, a cute and somewhat predictable story about one juke-joint owner's Saturday night dilemma in a colourful millieu of fried chicken and slide guitar. But it serves as a metaphor for impermanence. Music is changing. The status quo is changing. Even the act of picking cotton -- so racially loaded an image -- would soon be taken over by machines.
Sayles never hits you on the head with this. His eye stays fairly focused on Pinetop, who is losing business to a competitor with a newfangled jukebox, and is saddled with deadbeat regulars and an old blues-singer (Mable John) whom no one wants to hear.
His salvation, he hopes, is a booking by a Louisiana blues guitarist named Guitar Sam, who has actual hits on the radio.
His newly born-again wife Slim (Lisa Gay Hamilton) is holding the family together working as a maid for a rich white woman (Mary Steenburgen) by day and cooking at Honeydripper by night.
Their pride and joy is their daughter China Doll (Yaya DaCosta) who has eyes for Sonny.
Suffice to say, Guitar Sam is notoriously unreliable, and Pinetop has to resort to a fairly obvious fraud to get himself out of the scrape.
A movie with a lot of pulled dramatic punches, Honeydripper is still very likable (even the Sheriff proves to have a benevolent side, though we can envision him becoming a Bull Connor a decade later when the U.S. Civil Rights movement becomes real).
But its real attraction is real blues stars playing live with an energy that would float a much lesser movie than this. Mable John is the real deal, as is Keb' Mo', who plays a blind street musician only Sonny and Pinetop can see (such surrealist characters are a Sayles trademark). And Clark is an actual Austin prodigy playing vintage R&B.
On this score, Honeydripper sounds like one heck of a movie.
(This film is rated PG)
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