Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Bitchin’: The Sound and Fury Of Rick James’ on Showtime, A Vivid Portrait Of A Troubled Legacy

After premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival, Bitchin’ The Sound and Fury of Rick James makes it way to Showtime, and brings with it a truckload of funk power, parsing of legacy, and the ravages of addiction in telling its story of the late musician, songwriter, and producer famous as much for set piece moments like the 1981 single “Super Freak” and his reliably outlandish persona as as his sordid history of drug use and violence. It’s such a freaky scene.  

BITCHIN’: THE SOUND AND FURY OF RICK JAMES: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: A born showman and natural musician who hustled his way out of Buffalo, New York, hooked up with the folk and rock movements of the late 1960s and recorded at Hitsville USA before finding multi-Platinum fame on the West Coast with a string of 1970’s and early ‘80s albums that blended the pose and strut of rock and roll with electrifying funk grooves, Rick James was a vibe made human, and a man as hungry for adulation and success as he was for the darker desires of sexual and pharmacological excess. In exploring the dual legacies of James’s career and personal life, Bitchin’ director Sacha Jenkins draws on interviews with the musician’s daughter Ty and her mother Syville Morgan, his ex-wife Tanya Hijazi members of his Stone City Band who knew him before the fame in Buffalo and crested with him on the wave of success, music world luminaries like Ice Cube and Bootsy Collins, as well such noted scholars as USC professor and cultural commentator Todd Boyd, critic Jason King, and author David Ritz. Together with a ton of vintage performance and interview footage, the complexion of James as a somewhat unheralded 20th century musical innovator who also fought with the demons of drug use, depression and sexual perversion comes to light.

His Buffalo roots figure heavily into the James narrative, as does his keen ear for musicianship, as a performer but also very much so as a songwriter and producer. A Motown producer isolates tracks on a mixing board and calls James the master of handclaps before counting out no less than three intros to a track; as a writer and bandleader, he was hungry for it all, and crafted hits for Teena Marie and Mary Jane Girls. But he was hungry for a lot more, too, and descriptions of his insatiable sexual appetite and penchant for disturbing behavior and misogyny aren’t glossed over by any of the interviewees here, family or otherwise. As the 1980s wore on and his star began to fade, James’s cocaine habit escalated to unforeseen levels of abuse, culminating in charges of assault and torture that led to a three-year stint in prison. And upon release, James struggled mightily with sobriety while also embracing a new mark of fame as both an icon of an era and a punchline. “I’m Rick James, bitch!” went the Chappelle’s Show catchphrase echoed in this doc’s title, and not soon after James was dead at the age of 56.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Bitchin’ director Sacha Jenkins has a history with Showtime. He helmed the Emmy-nominated series Wu-Tang Clan: Of Mics and Men for the network, and will team with Nas to bring Hip Hop 50 to Showtime, celebrating the legacy of the genre from its roots in 1973 onward. And if you haven’t caught Chappelle’s Show recently, the pioneering early-2000s sketch comedy show (now streaming on Netflix and HBO Max) is worth a revisit, particularly in light of the now infamous — and honestly still hilarious — “Charlie Murphy’s True Hollywood Stories” sketch that became the crux of James’s late-life visibility.

Performance Worth Watching: Of the wealth of archival footage here, James’s appearances on Soul Train between 1978 and 1981 offer immediate, visceral insight into not only the man and his onstage persona, but how music of the era was presented and consumed. From James wielding a keytar that resembles a seventies Dr. Who Dalek transformed into a musical instrument, to spangled spandex for days and the baritone honey of Don Cornelius on introductions duty, the Soul Train sequences are lasting relics of the age.

Memorable Dialogue: Asked by the interviewer whether it’s true that she met Rick James at an orgy, Syville Morgan, mother of two of his children, laughs it off. Sort of. “It was a party, it was an orgy. You know, it was civilized. It wasn’t just crazy.”

Sex and Skin: Words like “debauchery” and “disturbing” attach themselves to descriptions of Rick James’s prolific sex life, and his daughter casually describes how she used to have to step over naked women in the mornings after wild parties at his house. Animated sequences depict some of this.

Our Take: The Sound and Fury of Rick James certainly supports his “pied piper of punk funk” moniker. Throughout, James is all outsized performance, engaging his physicality and trademark braided hairdo in a non-stop assault on owning the room, no matter the size and not even just the ones with a stage. This guy was feeling himself one hundred percent of the time, and when he wasn’t feeling himself there were plenty of other people around to grope. James’s family celebrates him as a good man, but a flawed one, too — it’s to Sound and Fury‘s credit that it doesn’t veer into hagiography. It’s the same with the musicians and other industry folks interviewed. Ice Cube posits that James’s 1981 album Street Songs, and especially its song “Mr. Policeman,” engaged in a form of proto-hip-hop. (A montage of police brutality towards African-Americans includes a quick shot of George Floyd’s murder.) And Nile Rodgers acknowledges James’s unparalleled reputation as a musician. But he also admits that drug abuse was something James just couldn’t outrun, and industry vets who knew him point to it as the fault that ultimately tarnished the Rick James star. Bitchin’: The Sound and Fury of Rick James is vivid in its storytelling and revealing in its interviews, but it’s refreshing that it finds a means of elevating his musical legacy without ever letting its subject off the hook for his more problematic legacy of indiscretions.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Bitchin’: The Sound and Fury of Rick James shows us how he brought the rhythms of rock and roll and visual sense of David Bowie and Kiss to the boundless, exciting, and sexified possibilities of funk music, making punk-funk his calling card even as he indulged in every excess imaginable. Don’t you play no games.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges

Watch The Sound and Fury of Rick James on Showtime