Stream It Or Skip It: ‘A Jazzman’s Blues’ on Netflix, Tyler Perry’s Awkwardly Ambitious Musical Melodrama Set in the Racist South

Tyler Perry’s latest Netflix outing is A Jazzman’s Blues, a period melodrama in which the multi-hyphenate filmmaker funnels considerable ambition, the most we’ve seen from him since at least 2010’s For Colored Girls. You know Perry as the man behind the loud, brash Madea comedies (and wearing fat-suit drag); the man who writes and directs handfuls of TV series and movies every year; the man who turned the business of Black-owned entertainment into a billion-dollar empire. Jazzman finds Perry diverting from his usual formula and aiming higher than ever with a Jim Crow-era musical-romance-tragedy that prompts one to wonder if he’s hoping for Oscar recognition or just taking a more artful turn.

A JAZZMAN’S BLUES: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: HOPEWELL COUNTY, GEORGIA, 1987. An old woman hobbles along the train tracks to town. She nudges her way into the office of the man running for Attorney General – a man with notably racist views – and plops a stack of old letters on his desk. Time for him to read up on a murder from 1947, she insists, then walks out. His curiosity quickly eclipses his dismissiveness. He opens the first letter, and we flash back to rural Summerville, Georgia, 1937. We hear Bayou (Joshua Boone) reading the letters in voiceover. He’s 17, and not his daddy’s favorite. He’s an outcast bullied by his father (E. Roger Mitchell) and older brother Willie Earl (Austin Scott), both musicians who seem to exist to do two things: play jazz and humiliate Bayou. His mother Hattie Mae (Amirah Vann) defends her youngest the best she can. Bayou meets Leanne (Solea Pfeiffer), a 16-year-old outcast who others degradingly call “Bucket.” She’s under the “care” of her awful, boozing grandfather.

Bayou and Leanne find solace in each other’s company: He shows her tenderness, and she teaches him to read. She throws paper planes in his window with love notes written on them. But there’s no happily-ever-after in their future. Daddy and Willie Earl bust off to Chicago to chase their dreams of stardom, leaving Bayou and Hattie Mae to fend for themselves. And Leanne’s mother drags her away. A decade passes, a decade that saw Bayou briefly pulled into military service and writing letters to Leanne that are all returned unopened; Hattie Mae opening her own juke joint, where she and Bayou sing their hearts out; and the light-skinned Leanne passing as white, married off to the racist sheriff’s brother, all arranged by her cruel mother. The sheriff shakes down Hattie Mae for bribes and a promise not to shut her down. Willie Earl returns without Daddy, but with a manager, Ira (Ryan Eggold), who promises a shot at a big gig in Chicago. And Bayou still pines for Leanne.

Fate (or the screenwriter’s hand) contrives against probability to put Bayou and Leanne in the same room together, which gets the ball rolling again, except this time, it’s especially verboten. The sheriff and his brother and the other white boys get their torches and pitchforks, and Bayou runs out of town with Ira and Willie Earl. Chicago is kind to Bayou. His sweet voice lands him a marquee gig at the Capitol Royale, while Willie Earl’s intense jealousy – and third-rate trumpet skills – compel him to sour his veins with junk. But Bayou’s success can’t replace the yearning he feels for Leanne. He can’t keep away from Georgia. And so this freight train barrels ahead with melodramatic inevitability.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Jazzman takes the tone and aesthetic of a rural-set period drama a la Mudbound and uses it to dilute Perry’s penchant for OTT uberdrama, like we’ve seen in stuff like Acrimony, A Fall From Grace and the craziest scenes from the Why Did I Get Married?s.

Performance Worth Watching: A collection of solid, yet unspectacular performances shows that Perry has put all his cast members on the same page tonally for maybe the first time in his career. Vann is a standout, playing a multifaceted woman who has a passion for singing but also is a devoted mother who’s not above scraping by washing clothes or birthing local babies. There’s plenty to the character that remains unexplored in an overcrowded movie, though.

Memorable Dialogue: Bayou’s voiceover is warmed-over cornbread: “Dear Mama, we made it to Chicago. This place is like downtown everywhere.”

Sex and Skin: Car sex that barely steams up the windows; a brief rape scene, in soft focus in the background.

Our Take: A Jazzman’s Blues is pretty good by Tyler Perry standards, which makes it marginal by most others. But it’s a significant step forward from the slapped-together rush-job feel of so many of his movies, which are identifiable for their whiplash tonal shifts, hilariously bad wigs, OTT outbursts from off-the-leash actors and eff-it editing jobs. The film has an eye for textural detail that shows a commitment to tonal and visual authenticity – the lush moonlight on feathery weeping willows and the sweat on the walls of an underground juke joint are distinctly evocative of a time and place when, for Black southerners, cherishable moments of peace and joy were surrounded by the omnipresent menace of racism.

That dynamic would be plenty for most films, but thematically, Perry’s eyes are a bit bigger than his stomach. Instead of finding nuance and focus on the core idea, he embellishes his story with heavyweight cliches: The scourge of heroin. Familial abuse. The exploitative perils of the music business. Black women “passing” as white. The Holocaust. (Yes, the Holocaust; Bayou’s manager Ira is a German-Jewish immigrant survivor.) None of these topics gets due diligence; they clunk around like hard candies in a dish when they should be smoothly blended ingredients in a dense cake. Perry only deviates into unintentional comedy while crosscutting between a harrowing childbirth scene and Bayou’s opening act, an “African jungle” dance that would be highly offensive by modern standards. We can only puzzle over such a directorial decision, which finds Perry flinging narrative caution to the wind instead of letting chaff hit the cutting-room floor.

Although the musical sequences stand out for their representations of passion and pain, Boone struggles to bring Bayou to life as a full-blooded protagonist – he’s a character of two or three very loud notes when he should be a symphony of emotions, and remains passive until he makes one fatally bad proactive decision. Nevertheless, this story shows the kind of heart, soul and social relevance Perry rarely explores, which is admirable even when it leads him toward half-baked literary ambitions. Jazzman is sometimes an unwieldy and awkward movie, but never a bad one.

Our Call: A Jazzman’s Blues isn’t exactly Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. (Not even close, to be honest.) But it is eminently consumable, sometimes even highly watchable. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.