A Jazzman's Blues

Decidedly more serious fare, the first script Tyler Perry ever wrote finally comes to the screen with mixed results. While there's a lot to like about A Jazzman's Blues, it runs too long, scenes linger, and plenty of the writing and acting are a bit melodramatic. Further, the film wants to be a romance and a serious drama, but striking a harmonious tone that fits both these needs can be difficult. Instead, Perry bounces around between melodramatic romance, deadly serious drama, and faux-musical, each (very welcome) number occasionally struggling to justify its likeliness here. But these musical breaks, and even more so because of how good they are, hint at the film this could have been as a full, all-out musical. Because as is, a lot about this film feels like it's from the '90s.

And yet Perry presents his story clean and plain, letting the actors chew up their scenes as much as they can. Indeed, sometimes "mixed results" means that there's also a lot of good here. For one, Perry presents a palpably terrifying 1940s Georgia town, governed by, policed by, and run under the table and over it by racist White people. Also, the film shows a lot of subtle racism and how powerful this can be, like being able to blame anything and everything on Black people. The film also speaks to history and to how White people in the U.S. in particular have historically often tried (and some continue to try) to find ways of policing, harming, blaming, and killing Black people.