A gripping new documentary explores Louis Armstrong's experience as a Black American musician coming of age right along with the 20th century.
— and that influence can be felt in the film's stylish visual flow as well as the frankness of its racial disquisition.isn't the film to unpack what made Armstrong such an incandescent jazz pioneer, though it allows a few noted experts, like, to rhapsodize about his music.
It's a perspective birthed out of the civil rights movement and an ensuing era of Black pride, though the film demonstrates how engaged Armstrong was in the cause — often from a pragmatic position behind the scenes but sometimes in an utterly exposed position along its front lines. We get to witness the dissonance of a time when Armstrong is being sent across the world by the U.S. State Department, even as white supremacy is rearing its head back home.
Hardly any of the film's insightful commentators — old Armstrong associates like guitarist and banjoist Danny Barker, trusted advocates like journalist Dan Morgenstern and photographer Jack Bradley, Black cultural critics as ideologically distinct as Amiri Baraka and Stanley Crouch — ever appear on screen. That decision sharpens the focus on the archival photographs and scrapbook collages that Jenkins chooses to feature.
The admission lands with force, because of the way that Jenkins has set the stakes in the film. Armstrong was a titan who never forgot his humble upbringings, and also a public figure who carefully assessed his own weight in the world. He kept a history of slights and injustices in his back pocket, like anybody else. He strove toward a universal message with his music, while preserving the particularities that shaped his language.
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