RnB BIOPICS: TLC & Aaliyah

In the last few years, there have been several TV  biopics made about famous RnB singers. I have been slowly making my way through a list. I was going to wait until I'd watched a couple more, but better to keep it short and sweet.

CrazySexyCool: The TLC Story (2013)
From their discovery by LaFace Records, through early success, bankruptcy, illness, love and heartbreak, CrazySexyCool tells the story of the iconic nineties group TLC:  'T-Boz' Watkins (Drew Sidora), Rozanda 'Chilli' Thomas (Keke Palmer) and Lisa 'Left Eye' Lopes (Natia 'Lil Mama' Kirland).

This movie has a lot of things going for it: First of all, TLC's story is a classic example of a 'rags to riches'-style superstar narrative.

The movie benefits from great casting: First off, Lil Mama is great as Left Eye. If you only know her from Lip Gloss or her interview on the Breakfast Club, prepare to have your brain explode. This was also one of her earliest acting roles which makes the performance even more remarkable.

Keke Palmer and Drew Sidora are also good as, respectively, Chili and T-Boz. Due to the nature of the characters, they do not pop in the same way that Left Eye/Lil Mama does, but they are both good. It's hard to really describe because Lisa Lopes had such a definable persona, but both Palmer and Sidora provide the human anchor. It helps that they both get the most dramatic subplots: Chili has a fraught relationship with producer Dallas Austin, while T-Boz balances her desire to perform with her sickle-cell anemia.  

Like most biopics, supporting characters do feel like foot notes. The one exception is the band's manager and nemesis, Pebbles, played by Rochelle Aytes. Oscillating between big sister and Big Brother, Aytes is wonderfully hate-able. She provides the movie with its only moments of real tension, and the movie loses steam when she disappears halfway through.

Pebbles (Rochelle Aytes)

The movie tracks through the timeline of TLC's first four album releases, ending with Left Eye's tragic death in a car crash. In between, we get all the key moments from their 1992-2002 run: Lisa's refusal to sing during the 'Creep' video; Lisa burning down her boyfriend's mansion; and the group's famous speech at the 1996 Grammys, where they revealed they were broke.

Like all biopics, the movie suffers from trying to cover so much material, and about halfway through the movie loses focus. It is never clear whose story this is supposed to be - T-Boz and Chilli narrate, while Left Eye is a cypher. The filmmakers do a great job of interweaving the womens' shared struggles (the montage of their various romantic snafus is the best) but as the movie heads into the home stretch, I began to lose track of where these threads were going.

To be honest, once the group break off ties with Pebbles and start putting together Fan Mail, the movie loses a sense of conflict. Pebbles is such  great antagonist, but once she disappears, the movie doesn't have any real friction for the group. There is a secondary conflict involving Left Eye and her boyfriend trying to undermine the group, but it gets resolved fairly quickly (in story-time)/ It is in this section of the movie that you can feel the strain. Maybe if the movie had been a miniseries, these storylines could have been allowed to breath and resolve in a satisfying manner (especially considering how the story must end).

Stylistically, the movie is more ambitious than you would expect from a  small-screen biopic. Director Charles Stone III (Drumline) juggles the movie's various tones with enough skill that the script's rapid transitions never feel jarring. He also finds ways to make the film's various montages feel fresh and original.

Overall, CrazySexyCool is a fun flick. It covers too much ground, but it has great performances, good pacing and is far more cinematic than you would expect from a TV movie.  It is probably a good entry point for a newbie - you get a taste of most of the songs, and a decent summary of their career.

Aaliyah: The Princess of R&B (2014)

Aaliyah Haughton (1979-2001) became an overnight star with the release of her R Kelly-produced debut album in 1994. Following two more experimental albums, the fast-rising star's life was tragically cut short when she was killed in a plane crash.

Made without her family's involvement and without the rights to her music, this movie was cursed with production problems. Original lead Zendaya dropped out of the project 10 days before shooting, and Alexandra Shipp (X-Men, Tragedy Girls) was parachuted in with little time to train for the dance and singing sequences.

Top to bottom, this movie is a mess.

First off, the movie has no real through line. We follow Aaliyah's rise from talent shows to teen star, but there is no real sense of development. We get a bit of her relationship with R. Kelly, which we are told profoundly affected her, but we never feel it. The movie is in too much of a hurry to get to the big career milestones - which is when we run into the other big problem with the show: the music.

The only music we get are a few covers from her albums ('At Your Best (You Are Love)', 'Got To Give It Up') and 'Journey to the Past' from the Anastasia animated movie. Now the movie might have been able to get by with just these tracks if the movie had focused on something other than her music. The movie flirts with an emotional arc that might have strengthened the movie - we are told that Shipp's Aaliyah is profoundly affected by her relationship with R Kelly, and the movie tries to resolve  this by having her fall for Damon Dash. If treated as the movie's dramatic foundation, these two relationships could have given the movie a real shot at being good.

But the filmmakers chose to speed through her career highlights, and pay too much attention to the music we do not get to hear. We have scenes of Aaliyah meeting and working with Timbaland and Missy Elliott, but we never hear anything they are working on. Tracks are referenced but any time it looks like we might get to hear them, the movie cuts to another scene. It is like making a movie about the Wright Brothers but not having the rights to show the plane.

The cast do their best, and Shipp has a few scenes where she feels like a real person, but too much of the movie feels like a feature-length exposition dump.

The singer and the cast deserved better.

Related

Aaliyah retrospective