Great music carries New Edition biopic
In the end, there was always the music.
Music is the element that lifts BET’s “The New Edition Story” above the revisionism of the standard showbiz biopic that it is. The miniseries, starting Tuesday, Jan. 24, follows five boys from the Orchard Park housing projects in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood through superstardom as New Edition, and through a host of internal problems, to their unimpeachable status as one of the great R&B boy bands of the 20th century.
New Edition was formed in 1978 by five boys who were inspired by the Jackson 5 and others. They loved music, had a great sense of musical style and saw stardom as a way out of a life with limited options.
In other words, they were
ripe for exploitation, which they encountered, along with success. The original members — Bobby Brown, Ricky Bell, Ralph Tresvant, Michael Bivins and Ronnie DeVoe — were signed by local manager Brooke Payne (Wood Harris), who guided them in the early phase of their career. And once they were successful, they were even more ripe for exploitation. Their mothers essentially ran their careers, but the boys themselves signed the contracts.
Hit records, sold-out concert tours and worldwide fame only made the spotlight shine brighter, but still they saw almost no money. Their new manager, Gary Evans (Michael Rapaport), all but oozes phoniness as he first promises they’ll be huge stars and later explains that if they’d read their contracts, they would have seen they were virtually indentured servants to their record label. And to Evans as well, of course.
Let me pause here to point out that if Rapaport is playing your agent, keep your hand on your wallet at all times: The versatile character actor is especially good at playing bad.
The rest of the story you probably know from tabloid headlines, because that’s where Brown took the tale after his marriage to Whitney Houston, and various legal and drug problems.
The miniseries was developed by Jesse Collins, written by Abdul Williams and directed by Chris Robinson, with all five original New Edition members and Johnny Gill, who joined in 1987, serving as producers.
The six-hour, three-night miniseries includes the fistfights, drug use, temper tantrums, breakups, reunions and scandals that really happened to the group over its 30 years, but so little time is spent with these events, they seem like spats or minor transgressions.
We do see Brown getting arrested. And the filmmakers have included Houston (Ashley Wade) and maybe Bobbi Kristina, but they are seen in the background, with their faces turned away from the camera. In one scene, the camera is trained on Woody McClain as Brown, and only a bit of Wade’s arm and shoulder make it into the frame.
The performances and the musical numbers are more than just the mortar between superficially sketched moments of history: They’re the reason the miniseries is great fun to watch.
The actors playing the original New Edition members as kids are so good you almost don’t want their characters to grow up. The talented quintet includes Caleb McLaughlin as Bell, Myles Truitt as DeVoe, Jahi Di’Allo Winston as Tresvant, Tyler Marcel Williams as Brown and Dante Hoagland as Bivins.
Their grown-up counterparts are equally fine: Bryshere Y. Gray as Bivins, Elijah Kelley as Bell, Keith Powers as DeVoe, Algee Smith as Tresvant and McClain as Brown. Luke James does a fine turn as Gill as well.
As good as the cast is, the music is even better, with many of the group’s most memorable hits, such as “Mr. Telephone Man,” “Candy Girl” and, most of all, “Can You Stand the Rain” are celebrated in exquisitely choreographed and costumed performances, overseen by Kenny “Babyface” Edmonds, Antonio Dixon, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, with Barry Cole as music supervisor.
We may easily suspend disbelief here as with any showbiz biography — “Funny Girl,” “Star,” “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” even Lifetime’s “Whitney” from two years ago — because that’s the nature of the genre. Nobody tunes in to this kind of project expecting a wealth of accuracy, depth or detail. With “The New Edition Story,” you tune in for the music, just as you’ve done for more than more than three decades.