Riveting documentary ‘Tina’ lets Turner tell her story her way
If she said it once, she said it many, many times. Tina Turner really, really does not want to talk about Ike.
“I’m not so thrilled about thinking about the past and how I lived my life,” she said during a news conference for “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” the 1993 biopic that dedicated a big chunk of screen time to Turner’s abusive ex-husband. “I don’t love that it’s always talked about, you see.”
And yet here she is, in a new HBO documentary, talking about Ike.
Like the aforementioned biopic — and the 1986 autobiography (“I, Tina,” co-written with journalist Kurt Loder) and the groundbreaking 1981 People interview that launched a few zillion follow-up interviews — HBO’s “Tina” spends a lot of time on the man who gave Tina her career and almost stole her life. The man who named her “Tina” in the first place.
But to the credit of Turner and the Oscar-winning filmmakers Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin (“Undefeated”), the documentary is also about so much more than Tina’s struggles to be free of Ike. Over its interview-packed 118 minutes, “Tina” gives us a layered, multifaceted portrait of a woman who is a survivor of both childhood aban
donment and harrowing acts of violence. As the generous helping of performance clips reminds us, she is also an astounding singer, a showstopping performer and a sweaty, soulful force of nature.
The story Turner is reluctant to rehash says a lot about who she is, but as “Tina” makes abundantly clear, it isn’t all she is.
To give us the full Tina Turner picture, Lindsay and Martin weave in new and archival interviews with Tina, and archival interviews with Ike, who died of a cocaine overdose in his San Marcos home in 2007. There are also insightful interviews with Loder, People magazine editor Carl Arrington, actress Angela Bassett (who played Turner in “What’s Love Got to Do With It”), longtime assistant Rhonda Graam, backup singers and dancers, and Turner’s oldest son, Raymond Craig Turner. The documentary is dedicated to Craig, who died by suicide in 2018, and Graam, who died earlier this year.
The filmmakers also skip the traditional timeline approach in favor of five “chapters” devoted to themes in Turner’s life. Chapter I (“Ike & Tina”) covers the history of the couple, from Ike discovering that the 17-year-old Anna Mae Bullock could really sing, through their hard-driving years as the Ike & Tina Turner Revue, where Ike played guitar and led the band, and Tina was the whirling soul dervish in the spotlight.
It also introduces us to the pre-Tina professional betrayals that made Ike paranoid and possessive. When he realized that Tina was really the star of the show, he figured the best way to keep her from leaving was to marry her. (“Tina was the gold mine, and he knew it. He had to control her,” backup singer Jimmy Thomas says.) Somewhere along the way, Ike started beating her. Including when she was pregnant with their son, Ronnie.
Chapter II (“Family”) covers the Turners’ move to Los Angeles with Ronnie, Craig (Tina’s son from a previous relationship), Ike Jr., and Michael (both from Ike’s relationship with girlfriend Lorraine Taylor). According to Craig, Tina was very strict with the kids, and Ike used beatings, social isolation and nonstop work to keep an iron grip on Tina.
This chapter also gives us a rare glimpse into Tina’s childhood, where her parents fought like crazy before abandoning her and her older sisters to the care of various relatives. We also get Tina’s insights into Ike, whose glowering public persona was just a cover-up for massive insecurities.
That chapter ends with Tina surviving a suicide attempt, discovering Buddhism and finding the strength to leave Ike. She walked out of a Dallas hotel in July of 1976 with one small suitcase and no plans at all. When they divorced in 1978, the only thing Tina asked for was the rights to her name.
Chapter III is all about Turner’s comeback, when she went from tacky Las Vegas shows and pay-the-rent TV gigs to recording 1984’s multimillion-selling “Private Dancer” album. Thanks to the smash hit “What’s Love Got to Do With It” (which Turner hated) and the many hits that followed, she got the arena-filling, Grammywinning rock-star career she always wanted.
Then comes Chapter IV, and “The Story.” In one of the documentary’s most compelling turns, “Tina” takes a deep dive into the abuse-survivor’s narrative that changed Turner’s life in ways that were both profound and painful.
In 1981, at the urging of new manager Roger Davies, Tina agreed to tell her very private story to People’s Carl Arrington. Davies thought it would be the best way for Tina to separate herself from Ike and launch the new phase of her career. He was right on both counts. What neither of them knew was that telling the story once would never be enough.
From that point on, any interview Turner did would include questions about Ike. Any Tina-related project — her autobiography, the movie, the Broadway play, this documentary — would have its Ike-related moments. As one of the first prominent women to talk about her experiences with domestic violence, Turner helped countless women open up for the first time. But she could never really close the book on Ike. She never liked it, but she learned to live with it. Her amazing life story was hers to tell, even with him in it.
“It’s a reality. It’s a truth,” she says in a 2019 interview with the filmmakers. “That’s what you’ve got, so you have to accept it.”
Chapter IV is titled “Love,” and it is short and sweet. After many years of feeling unseen and unloved (“I have not had one love affair that was genuine and sustained itself,” Turner says in a remarkable interview Loder taped for the book), Turner met German record executive Erwin Bach in 1986 and was immediately smitten. After a few decades of blissful coupledom, Turner and Bach got married in 2013. They live in Zurich, Switzerland.
As “Tina” comes to a close, Turner — who turns 82 in November — is contemplating her next quiet chapter. “How do you bow out slowly?” she wonders. “Just … go away?”
But as the credits roll, we see a clip of peak Tina performing “Simply the Best” before a massive stadium crowd. “Sing it, everybody!” she commands. And they do. Because she is Tina Turner, and she is simply remarkable. By showing us the human being behind the star and the heart that fueled the soul, “Tina” is the clear-eyed tribute she deserves.