Honeydripper

68

Emerging Pictures (123 minutes)
and John Sayles
Danny Glover , Charles S. Dutton , Lisa Gay Hamilton , Stacy Keach , Mary Steenburgen , Yaya DaCosta , Sean Patrick Thomas , and Gary Clark Jr.

Rating: PG-13 for brief violence and some suggestive material

Summary: It's 1950, and it's a make-or-break weekend for Tyrone Purvis (Danny Glover), the proprietor of the Honeydripper Lounge. Deep in debt, Tyrone is desperate to bring back the crowds that used to come to his place. He decides to lay off his longtime blues singer Bertha Mae and announces that he has hired a famous guitar player, Guitar Sam, for a one-night-only gig in order to save the club. Into town drifts Sonny Blake, a young man with nothing to his name but big dreams and the guitar case in his hand. Rejected by Tyrone when he applies to play at the Honeydripper, he is intercepted by the corrupt local sheriff, arrested for vagrancy, and rented out as an unpaid cotton picker to the highest bidder. But when Tyrone's ace-in-the-hole fails to materialize at the train station, his desperation leads him back to Sonny and the strange, wire-dangling object in his guitar case. The Honeydripper Lounge is all set to play its part in rock and roll history. (Emerging Pictures)

Ernest Hardy
LA Weekly:
(90) Honeydripper is classic Sayles cinema: an insightful sketch of assorted common folk whose criss-crossing dreams and agendas unfold against larger, more powerful (and sometimes crushing) sociopolitical and cultural forces.

John Anderson
Variety:
(90) The result is one of Sayles' best films. The music, a mix of blues, seminal rock and newcomer Gary Clark Jr.'s performance, will be an obvious draw, as will the performances by some leading African-American actors.

Roger Ebert
Chicago Sun-Times:
(88) Rich with characters and flowing with music.

Jonathan Rosenbaum
Chicago Reader:
(80) Danny Glover, as hard-rock reliable as Spencer Tracy in his prime, plays onetime pianist Tyrone "Pine Top" Purvis.

Andrew O'Hehir
Salon.com:
(80) Honeydripper offers a leisurely, atmospheric production with lots of time to appreciate his largely African-American cast, along with rocking musical interludes and just the faintest wash of spirituality.

Kevin Crust
Los Angeles Times:
(80) Music may be Honeydripper's most indelible element and Sayles and longtime collaborator, composer Mason Daring, seamlessly incorporate several original songs alongside the soundtrack's period tunes.

<< Home