Jimi: All Is by My Side Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.0
Overall		3.5

Jimi: All Is by My Side Blu-ray Movie Review

Have You Ever Been . . . Experienced?

Reviewed by Michael Reuben January 12, 2015

As both a performer and a musician, guitarist Jimi Hendrix hit the world of popular music like a bolt of lightning, and it may be impossible to convey the sheer intensity of the impact to anyone who wasn't around in June 1967, when Hendrix's incendiary (literally) performance at the Monterey Pop Festival electrified the crowd. Within months, the debut album of his band, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, was everywhere, and the song "Purple Haze" could be heard from the window of every college dorm room across America. Eric Clapton, who was then considered the world's leading blues guitarist, summed it up for everyone when he said that, after hearing Hendrix play, "my life was never the same again".

Just over three years later, Hendrix was dead of a drug overdose at the age of 27, leaving behind the kind of legend that always remains when an artistic prodigy blazes into the public consciousness just long enough to create a sensation, then vanishes, leaving a small but highly influential body of work. Against formidable odds, writer/director John Ridley (an Oscar winner for the screenplay of 12 Years a Slave) has attempted to bring Hendrix to life on screen, despite the refusal of the Hendrix estate to allow the use of any of the late musician's original work. (The estate wanted creative oversight in exchange for the license.) Ridley's solution was to focus on Hendrix's life immediately before he became a star. The film's greatest asset is a remarkable performance by André Benjamin, who simultaneously captures the elusive, almost mystical quality that Hendrix famously exuded, but also shows you glimpses of the vulnerable young man struggling to deal both with inner demons and a show business world that was starting to expect a lot from him (and would shortly demand much more).

It should be noted at the outset that Ridley's account has been sharply criticized by close associates of Hendrix, including one of the women portrayed in the film. It was evident to me, however, that Ridley's screenplay had "composited" certain characters in order to explore multiple aspects of Hendrix within a limited time frame. It might have been safer to change several names, but too many of the events depicted in the film are matters of record.

Jimi finds Hendrix in New York's Greenwich Village in 1966, where he is performing at the Cheetah Club with Curtis Knight and the Squires. There he is spotted by Linda Keith (Imogen Poots), then-girlfriend of Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. They strike up a friendship that, at least in the film's account, remains platonic, and it is Linda who gets him a manager in the person of Chas Chandler (Andrew Buckley), former bassist for the Animals. Chandler brings Hendrix to England and enlists the Animals' business manager, Michael Jeffreys (Burn Gorman), to straighten out his prior contracts. Then Chandler and Hendrix set about creating the trio that will become the Jimi Hendrix Experience, with bassist Noel Redding (Oliver Bennett) and drummer Mitch Mitchell (Tom Dunlea). In the process, the spelling of "Jimmy" gets changed to the more exotic "Jimi".

Almost immediately upon Hendrix's arrival in England, Linda is supplanted by another woman, Kathy Etchingham (Captain America 's Hayley Atwell), whose less-than-flattering portrayal has been denounced by her real life counterpart. Etchingham has also denied that Hendrix ever struck her, although he was known to hit other girlfriends when drunk. But the film's portrayal of the relationship's ups and downs, in counterpoint to the inner struggles of the often inarticulate musician to overcome doubts, gather his strength and burst onto the musical scene, are a portrait in miniature of Hendrix's many relationships with women during the remainder of his short life. Drawn to his exotic charisma, they would often find themselves frustrated by his lack of availability, emotionally and otherwise, as Hendrix focused everything on his musical calling.

The relationship with Kathy is complicated by the appearance of Ida (Ruth Negga), an African-American from Milwaukee, who has no qualms about identifying herself as a "groupie", while Kathy steadfastly insists that she's a "girlfriend". In a taste of the intrigues that swirl around many successful entertainers, Ida sets about undermining the relationship, telling Kathy that Hendrix doesn't love her, and whispering to Jimi that Kathy doesn't respect him. Her goal, of course, is to latch onto Hendrix herself, if only for long enough to add him to her collection.

André Benjamin perfectly captures the distant, abstracted quality with which Hendrix seemed to treat the world, almost as if he were an alien deposited here from another planet, trying to make sense of the strange creatures constantly importuning him with their needs. Ridley's script provides enough context to suggest good reasons why the young artist instinctively withdrew behind a veil of shyness in scenes where he calls his father from London to report his early success and suffers harsh rejection; where Kathy reproaches him for not offering more resistance when they are harassed by police, and he tries to explain what it means to be black; and, most potently, in a confrontation with an English pot dealer named Michael X (Adrian Lester), who lectures Hendrix on the need to inspire his "people". Hendrix responds effectively to the recruiting speech, but no one as alert as he was to the world around him could have been immune to the powerful forces clashing nightly on TV. (The events depicted in Selma were just two years old, and the war in Vietnam was ramping up in intensity.)

Shooting in Dublin to simulate Sixties London, and judiciously inserting authentic footage from the period, Ridley invokes the psychedelic age without heavy reliance on camera distortions or the kind of abstract special effects that filmmakers of the period used to suggest an acid trip. Instead, editor Hank Corwin (a veteran of Natural Born Killers and The Tree of Life) jumps forward and backward in the same scene, overlays dialogue, abruptly drops out all the sound, and uses other techniques of pure editing to convey the sense of a world where perception itself is changing. Like Aristotle, Hendrix believed in the power of music to communicate directly with people's emotions. Unfortunately for Jimi, people are affected by many other things, even when they're blessed with genius.

Jimi: All Is by My Side Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Jimi: All Is By My Side was shot by Irish cinematographer Tim Fleming, whose extensive experience in British TV was good preparation for the film's digital photography. (Specific details about the shooting format were unavailable.) XLrator Media's 1080p, AVC-encode Blu-ray features a sharply detailed, densely saturated image, whose rich reds, browns and golds may not precisely represent the textures of the period, but they accurately convey its emotional texture, particularly for the film's version of Jimi Hendrix. (His music, as he explains at one point, is all about "colors".) It's notable that the few scenes set in Harlem, where Hendrix lived in New York, are relatively flat and desaturated. Harlem, to Hendrix, was a place where nothing was happening, either personally or musically. It was downtown and, later, in London, where he blossomed into the performer who took the world by storm.

With very few extras, XLrator has devoted most of a BD-25 to the film, but at 118 minutes, this still yields an average bitrate of 20.50, which seems low for the many scenes of frenetic musical performances and quick cutting. Digital origination assists the compressionist here, as do the letterbox bars, and artifacts were not in evidence, but XLrator is pushing it.

Jimi: All Is by My Side Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The film's 5.1 soundtrack, encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA, is dominated by Hendrix's musical performances, recreated vocally by André Benjamin and on guitar by Waddy Wachtel. Both are faithful to the Hendrix style, and these renditions sound clearer and more distinct than on most original recordings. Examples include the cover of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" that the Experience famously performed at the Savile Theatre on June 4, 1967 before an audience containing both George Harrison and Paul McCartney (the album had just been released), and a version of "Wild Thing" that plays over the closing credits. Various songs from the period play throughout the film, often as source music. Most of the dialogue is clear, although Benjamin's recreation of Hendrix's speech patterns is so accurate that he can occasionally be difficult to understand, as was Hendrix.

Jimi: All Is by My Side Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Music by Waddy, Lyrics by Danny (1080i; 1.78:1; 4:19): This is a short interview with Waddy Wachtel, who co-wrote the score and performed the guitar solos for the film.



• Theatrical Trailer (1080p; 2.39:1; 1:39): "When the power of love takes over the love of power, that's when things will change."



• Additional Trailers: At startup, the disc plays trailers for The Machine, Poker Night and Ironclad: Battle for Blood, which can be skipped with the chapter forward button and are not otherwise available once the disc loads.

Jimi: All Is by My Side Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Jimi: All Is By My Side may not be the last time that anyone tries to capture the spirit of Jimi Hendrix in a bio-pic, but given how many years it has taken even to get this version, it would be a mistake to expect another one soon. It's the nature of artists who die young to remain mysterious, because, no matter how advanced or mature their talent, their development as people has been cut short long before that talent has had an opportunity to engage with the full range of life's experience. Tantalized by the prospect of what might have been, we will always be frustrated by the attempt to know someone who was never fully formed. By ending Jimi just as Hendrix heads off to the Monterey Festival that launched him into the stratosphere, Ridley's film acknowledges that sense of incompleteness. It's a challenging work, but I recommend it.