A Jazzman’s Blues

A Jazzman’s Blues

Since Tyler Perry’s first feature film “Diary of a Mad Black Woman” in 2005, his films have been deemed crit proof, but outlets such as this keep sending writers to review them. Partly because it’s their job. But he is a creator who has always merited critical attention. The populism of the work, its sometimes-strident quasi-evangelical moralism, its occasional theatricality (which illuminates Perry’s artistic roots); all worth thinking about. Even if it doesn’t do what you expect.

Perhaps Perry’s shrewd moves into the Hollywood mainstream through roles in movies that make headlines, from “Gone Girl” to “Don’t Look Up,” have extended the reach of his directing. And with his recent Netflix deal, that directing has gone into new areas. His latest picture, “A Jazzman’s Blues,” which does not feature Perry as an actor, comes from a script he says he wrote 27 years ago.

On a recent appearance on “The Today Show,” Perry said: “I had to be strategic in what I was doing before so I had to make sure I had a hit after a hit after a hit so this one I just wanted to take my time and do it at the right moment.” Telling this story now became necessary because book banning is being done presently; black history is being distorted now; black history is being homogenized now; slavery and Jim Crow are being homogenized now; everything about that era infuriated him.

“A Jazzman’s Blues” demonstrates very early on that Perry has become fluent as a filmmaker. The setup of the story is framed straight out of John Grisham maybe: Sometime not too long ago past, an old black woman watches on TV as the current attorney general of Hopewell, Ga., makes his political pitch by airing racist views she deems reprehensible. Nonetheless, she walks into his office soon after with a stack of letters and a request. “You want me to look into a murder that happened over 40 years ago,” says the bureaucrat, incredulous. (As it happens the woman knows everything but means to instruct.) Flashback to 1937, and a rural black community, and much unhappiness.

Joshua Boone stars as Bayou, a sensitive, tentative young man who comes from a family of traveling musicians including a father who growls that “Boy got to learn to get tough at some point” and a brother, Willie Earl (Austin Scott), who looks at him with Cain and Abel contempt. Good fortune comes Bayou’s way in the form of LeAnne (Solea Pfeiffer), an outcast of a different sort. “I can still smell the lavender and the moonshine,” he avers in one of his letters. The two share a secret love for a little while. She teaches him how to read. But her mother snatches her back up North and marries her off she can pass for white to a well-off Caucasian.

In 1947, Bayou and LeAnne have an awful reunion. “What is wrong with these negroes down here?” asks one of LeAnne’s new people when Bayou takes a seat in the kitchen of a white family. “Oh, we keep ’em in line,” says a representative of local law enforcement.

After some more twists and turns not secret enough return to amorous activity between Bayou and Leanne; Leanne’s mom trying to get Bayou lynched; etc.; etc.; etc. things are forced: Bayou has to go north (he had actually been doing OK at mom Hattie’s roadhouse). As time goes on, his singing starts paying off. He is the jazzman of the title, but funnily enough success as a singer doesn’t make up for losing your love. The tension between him and trumpet-playing Willie Earl gets worse, especially after Willie Earl turns to heroin. There is also A Baby involved. And An Ill-Fated Visit Back Home.

The direction maintains smoothness and tension (while sometimes serving up peculiar juxtapositions: childbirth intercut with “jungle”-themed nightclub dance), and Perry’s script hits a lot of notes right on the nose (there’s a white jazz booker who’s a Jew who escaped the Holocaust), and why not, but it also has a lot of astute observations about the psychology of racism.

A scene in which LeAnne, living the life of a white woman, upbraids a dark-skinned “domestic,” is genuinely jarring. The movie’s star-crossed lovers are caught in an American racism loop, their existences defined by a desire for escape; escape is romantic, this movie has its romantic side. But underneath the trappings including Aaron Zigman’s luscious score and Brett Pawlak’s near-dreamy cinematography there is genuine anger at the utter senselessness of our hate.

(Some critics have compared Perry to Douglas Sirk. This is not just apples and oranges but Granny Smiths and blood oranges; each exercises social consciousness in entirely distinct ways.)

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