The new release that might just be the best movie of the year.
NETFLIX’S JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE CONCERT IS, INCREDIBLY, ONE OF THE BEST FILMS OF THE YEAR
Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids
There are some very compelling reasons to regard Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids as frivolous or trivial. To begin with, it’s a feature- length concert special, which tend to be about as interesting esthetically as televised college football games. It’s a genre that rarely aspires to any station loftier than the Special Interest aisle of your local DVD store.
This concert in particular doesn’t even claim niche intrigue: Justin Timberlake is maybe the closest thing popular music has to a matinee idol in 2016, after all, and his live show is so extravagant that it seems more Cirque du Soleil than Live at Leeds.
And finally, this whole slick production was engineered by Netflix, whose algorithmic intuition has so far yielded a whole lot of appetizing standup and must-binge TV but very little in the way of serious film.
Certainly it’s possible that a live JT concert would entertain. But can this special achieve anything more? Oh, yes.
At a certain point in Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids the viewer is gripped by a curious sensation. Let me tell you how it happens: there’s Timberlake in a trim black Tom Ford three- piece, twirling gamely in the middle of an elevated Plexiglas bridge, suspended above the audience of the MGM Grand as if he’d willed himself to float. There’s the camera — one of what seems like two dozen, maybe more, the lot of them orchestrated by director Jonathan Demme with panoptic verve — hanging way back toward the rear of the stage, behind the 20- piece backing band; they’re tearing through Let the Groove Get In, and Demme fixes Timberlake dead centre in the shot, gyrating in the background, while two horn players flank him on either side in the foreground, the whole thing in deep focus. And there’s you: battered by bigband brass, awestruck by bleeding- edge pyrotechnics, stunned by splendour. It dawns on you right then and there that this is no mere frivolity. This is cinema.
Anyone who doubts the merits of the concert special as art hasn’t seen what Demme can do with it. He and his crew installed themselves on- site for the final two nights of Timberlake’s 20/ 20 Experience World Tour at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, and — with the exception of a 10- minute preludial sequence in which we’re introduced to the Tennessee Kids and other members of Timberlake’s hard- working coterie and an end- credits montage that surveys the construction of that stage before the show — this is nothing more than a rousing 80- minute live performance, shown to us unbroken, unchanged and unembellished.
As in Demme’s much- beloved Talking Heads concert special Stop Making Sense — still widely cherished as one of the greatest concert specials ever made, and therefore an inevitable ( and unenviable) point of comparison — the filmmaking is meant to serve the music.
The skill lies in what you don’t see: the elegance of the movement, the nimble way it’s cut and the camera’s generous, profoundly empathetic eye.
Indeed that generosity is central to the film’s appeal. If this is portraiture, it’s of Timberlake as the world’s nicest guy: Demme finds him ever bowing in earnest appreciation, giving high- fives to backup dancers and stagehands, and simply grinning with boyish delight after belting out a high note or pulling off a complicated bit of choreography.
The 20/ 20 Experience World Tour, in terms of pure live- music spectacle, is ludicrously over- thetop, a kind of spare- no- expense blockbuster. How delightful it is to discover, then, that the man at the centre of it all still has time to enjoy himself.
As Demme allows us to see it, JT is just a kid in a candy shop, singing, dancing and playing guitar with a thousand per cent more bottom- of- the- heart gusto than you’d expect of a boy- band ex- pat and millionaire career musician.
When Demme’s camera lingers on a bead of sweat as it rolls down Timberlake’s forehead, when it captures him turning around to face the crowd and flash his birthday- boy smile, when it holds him in close-up to reveal how genuinely humbled this man is by his own fans — it’s not flattery.
It’s a director homing in on the human element and letting us savour it.
And yet as much as Timberlake is plainly the star of the show — and as much as Demme, reverential of the scale and opulence of this production, allows him to accept the role as its ringleader — the virtue of Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids is that the second half of its title is afforded equal billing. It isn’t just in the pre- show prologue that we’re among the friendly faces of Timberlake’s crew: Demme finds the time to get to know every member of this ensemble, deferring, as we continually see Timberlake himself do, to the guitarists, drummers, dancers and vocalists on stage whenever one has occasion to shine.
“Look to your right and to your left,” JT tells the Tennessee Kids as they come together backstage for a hype- building ritual before the show. “That’s who this is all for.”
It’s a moment of humility, of gratitude, and of respect — and a hint of the joy in communion that flows through this film. Individually, JT and the Tennessee Kids know before they hit the stage that they’ll entertain. Together, they hope to achieve something more. ΩΩΩΩ
Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids is available on Netflix