American Symphony (2023)
A piercing documentary sees the gifted Jon Batiste confront triumph and anguish
Musical prodigy Batiste is celebrated and stripped bare in a joyful, searing documentary
American Symphony (2023)
Streaming on Netflix
Music never lies. Or so I’ve long believed. It can be played badly or beautifully, help us while away hours or get us up on our feet dancing. But it can’t lie.
I’m willing to suggest that Jon Batiste, the subject of this radically empathic documentary, might agree with me, though on the soundtrack he puts the matter a bit differently.
“It sounds inevitable,” Batiste says of music. Indeed, as we watch the 37-year-old multi-instrumentalist, composer, singer, dancer, bandleader, we feel music pour out of him whether we’re ready or not. You don’t just listen to Batiste; you make way for him.
American Symphony is set in the months leading up to and during 2022, a period in Batiste’s life that called on all his melodic gifts and demanded incalculable personal strength.
Musically, he was more than ready. He started playing percussion at age 8, released his first album at 17, earned two music degrees from Juilliard and from 2015 to 2022 was the crowd-pleasing bandleader on CBS’ The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
For at least four years up to 2022 he fed the dream of composing “American Symphony”, a musical pastiche that would bring together multiple impulses, traditions and drives he’d studied and called on for two decades.
European classical, Native American, jazz, pop, rap would blend into one long cry of the soul.
His effort to bring this piece to fruition, with dozens of collaborators, including instrumentalists and vocalists, forms the core of what award-winning director Matthew Heineman captures here.
It’s astonishing how Heineman manages to chronicle privacy while never seeming to invade it. We see Batiste in multiple sessions working with dozens of musicians shaping sounds, note by note, beat by beat.
He’s on a mission to put multicultural music-making at the center of the American story. His craft turns on an organizing principle which hasn’t been at the center of American musicology.
On the soundtrack he argues that the work of the marginalized, most extensively the creative output of African Americans, has been shunted aside. As he says in voiceover: “The levels of our achievement are diminished. They’re not seen as part of the canon.”
That’s a worthy act of cultural correction. But Heineman has earned a trust from Batiste that’s as deep-seated when it comes to Batiste’s private life. The result is that the director has woven together two movies, one inspiring, the other heartbreaking.
Together Suleika and Jon steadily work their way through pain with shared laughter
Leukemia has struck Batiste’s wife, writer Suleika Jaouad, for a second time. Back in 2011 she was diagnosed with leukemia and underwent a bone marrow transplant. After intermittent chemotherapy stretching over years, her cancer finally went into remission.
Now, when the documentary opens in 2022, the affliction has fiercely returned. As Jon’s musical dream is nearing fulfillment, leukemia has struck again.
We see Suleika bedridden, needles piercing her body, her eyes stilled with pain. I held my breath as I watched Jon, once her hair has begun to fall out in clumps, tenderly shave the rest away.
As he solemnly guides the clippers across Suleika’s exposed head, her memoir Between Two Kingdoms (2021), chronicling her earlier leukemia treatments and years of recovery, is on the New York Times bestseller list. And in this same moment Jon has been nominated for 11 Grammy awards.
Thus, the movements of his mammoth 40-minute symphony are beginning to fall into place, and it looks like his dream of performing it at Carnegie Hall with his carefully curated orchestra is within reach.
Yet here Batiste and Suleika stand, between two forces – uplifting art and cruel disease – pitched forward and terrified at the same time.
But Heineman doesn’t leave out delicious moments. It’s thrilling to watch Batiste and a couple of dozen singers and dancers romp across the stage performing at the Grammy Awards.
And it’s moving to see Batiste, clutching the four Grammys he’s already won that evening, wait tensely as Lenny Kravitz announces the winner of the 2022 Grammy Album of the Year.
It’s Batiste’s 2021 album We Are.
We see Batiste exuberantly leading his band Stay Human on the Colbert broadcast. He puts on a glittering high-stepping show in Las Vegas.
He sings and dances with abandon and elegant timing, the rhythms propelling him at the keyboard or prancing across the stage, with his dazzling smile and letting loose uncontainable whoops.
He’s both musician-entertainer and steadfast love partner. What’s unusual to be let in on here is how the conflict doesn’t actually tear him apart, though more than once we see him lying abed, numb with despair, trying to talk himself through buoying up Suleika while staying true to the music he believes he has to create.
The twin journeys are exhilarating and sobering. Heineman has performed a remarkable feat in getting Batiste and Suleika to let his camera come startingly close.
It’s lovely to attend the couple’s wedding during this same period, Suleika’s shaved head beneath a pearl-white bridal hat and veil. We know she’s committed to the ceremony and celebration with friends, but she’s far from well.
Soon after, it’s harrowing to watch Suleika weaken, turn ever paler, her eyes open but immobile as if she’s looking inward, wondering how much time she has left.
But Heineman doesn’t leave out delicious moments. It’s thrilling to watch Batiste and a couple of dozen singers and dancers romp across the stage performing at the Grammy Awards.
And it’s moving to see Batiste, clutching the four Grammys he’s already won that evening, wait tensely as Lenny Kravitz announces the winner of the 2022 Grammy Album of the Year.
It’s Batiste’s 2021 album We Are, and the look on his face as the win is announced is at first a wry puzzlement – can this really be happening? – then what seems a truly humble smile crosses his face, and he shows us those dazzling teeth.
From home Suleika watches the ceremony on television and the pride and contentment in her eyes seem to cast a glow on her face that looks like she’s healing.
Batiste on stage at Carnegie Hall finally bringing his musical dream to a live audience
And maybe that could be happening, because later, there she is seated in the Carnegie Hall audience, rapt, at the one-night performance of “American Symphony”.
Batiste is nervous in a way we haven’t seen him before. Fame, he’s told us, is a mixed blessing, and you risk losing your focus as a musical artist if you let it grip you too tightly.
Head held high in a classically tailored turquoise suit, he looks every inch the fretful artist transitioning into the onstage, do-or-die performer. Everything is on the line during this special one-night-only Carnegie concert.
All the musicians and musical tropes he’s worked to pull together have to coalesce, live on stage, under a conductor’s baton with Batiste center stage on keyboard. What’s more, to be sure, in the audience Suleika is filled with both pride and concern.
It would be a spoiler to describe all that happens on that stage. The event needs to be experienced in the movie for its power to sink in.
Let it simply be noted that Batiste the creator, whose watching wife is being tormented by illness, pulls through during a startling occurrence mid-performance.
You need to witness that struggle, that beautiful agony, for yourself. All I’ll say is, he doesn’t lie.