I had to search hard to find this documentary on one of my favourite singers, the late great Donny Hathaway. Although not the prolific songwriter that say, Stevie Wonder was, he was a wonderful keyboardist, arranger and bandleader. To top it all off, he also possessed one of the most beautiful voices of anyone I've ever heard. He came to prominence in the early 70's but failed to really establish himself as a solo artist, despite making some fine albums in his own name, increasingly relying on duets with his close friend Roberta Flack to get his name on the charts. Troubled all his adult life with paranoiac schizophrenia, he tragically took his own life in 1979, jumping from a New York hotel window, at the age of only 33.
This very stylised and I suspect very personally felt documentary treats his life in ways both conventional and unconventional. Yes, it takes us back to his roots in St. Louis, where we learn from his two surviving sisters and brother of his hand-to-mouth upbringing, then we visit his old neighbourhood haunts and get the reflections of other people he knew back then. The story moves forward as his talent takes him to New York where he's signed to the prestigious Atlantic record label and works with the label's renowned soul music producer Arif Mardin. There are interviews with some of his musical associates, including musician and producer James Mtume and naturally the since recently deceased Ms Flack, as well as with his widow, all of this painting a picture of a greatly talented but deeply troubled man.
All this is done I felt with very little reference to his musical career. None of the albums he recorded during his lifetime are specifically mentioned, there is virtually no time-signalling to assist the narrative and really only a handful of his songs are heard with even less video footage shown of any of his television or in-concert performances. Strangest of all is the depiction of presumably a male figure tramping around Donny's old haunts in his footsteps, representing presumably the "Voices Inside" which eventually drove him to self-destruction.
Maybe I've just watched too many conventional musical biographical documentaries but I didn't think that this particular production served the great man well. Listening at too much length to his surviving siblings talking about their own struggles in life as well as trying to prove that they too had great singing voices for me detracted from the central story. It was noticeable too that none of Donny's surviving children chose to appear.
His is a story which deserves to be told and perhaps this could be done with a suitably sympathetic musical biopic emphasising his difficulties in life, especially in these days of heightened awareness of mental illness, as well as promoting his musical triumphs. Quite who would be suitable to meet the dimensions of a man who was so complex and charismatic, I don't know, but this feature, while it is to be complimented on trying to shine a light in a too dark corner, nevertheless came over as too low-budget and deliberately arty to do proper justice to this great talent.
R. I. P. Donny, long gone but not forgotten.
