A slick but shallow biography of blues legend Robert Johnson, who died at age 27 with a mere eleven 78s of his darkly compelling songs issued during his lifetime. A transitional artist between Delta-style blues and the more sophisticated urban style, he traveled extensively and spread
his musical influence widely, although his personal life remained shadowy and mysterious for decades.
Born to a broken family, raised in itinerant labor camps in the deep South, Johnson discovered early that he would rather make music than hoe fields. Initially dismissed as untalented by elder bluesmen like Son House, he eventually surprised everyone by exhibiting a pure musical genius. Through
local talent scout H.C. Speir, he hooked up with a label that recorded him in two sessions in Texas, spawning the regional hit "Terraplane Blues." A vagabond and womanizer, he was eventually fed a glass of poisoned whisky by a man he cuckolded.
With only two photographs of Johnson publicly available (a studio portrait from 1935 and a photo-booth snapshot from the early 1930s), the film offers stock period footage mixed with scenes of Keb' Mo' playing Johnson in black-and-white vignettes, including an encounter with the devil and several
music-video-styled songs. Among those interviewed are frequent Johnson traveling companion Johnny Shines, and Robert Jr. Lockwood. Only four years younger than Johnson, Lockwood became known as his "stepson" when Johnson took up with Lockwood's mom, Esther; Robert Jr. subsequently switched from
playing organ to guitar, becoming the only person known to receive lessons from the fiercely self-protective Johnson. Along with Honeyboy Edwards, who accompanied Johnson on that fatal night, and with brief accolades from the likes of Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, and Robert Cray, the film's
resources are unassailable, yet it manages to fudge such important issues as Johnson's roots and influences. His style, however personal, however interpretive, was a skilled assimilation and outgrowth of numerous well-documented predecessors. His technique of playing the guitar "like a piano" is
alluded to, without description of what that means (walking bass lines, likely borrowed from boogie-woogie pianists). Instead, a Son House anecdote depicts an untalented Johnson disappearing for half a year and returning a virtuoso; narrator Danny Glover offhandedly attributes this metamorphosis
to a brief tutelage by Ike Zinnerman, a local guitarist whose name none of the interviewees even recognize.
Born out of wedlock, Johnson was raised by a man variously called Dodds and Spencer, adopting his real father's name of Johnson in his teens and using it for his recordings. But his acquaintances all knew him as Robert (or R.L.) Spencer, contributing to the difficulties encountered later by
scholars trying to research his life, and the mystery that surrounded him for decades. Once the past was unlocked however, the reminiscences from cohorts started to pour forth, often contradicting one another. (He was friendly/he was aloof; he was poisoned/he was stabbed.) Overall, the film offers
a simplified portrait of an individual who is universally agreed to have been a complicated and driven man.
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