I Wanna Dance with Somebody: Phenomenal performances lift Kiwi screenwriter’s disappointing Whitney Houston biopic

I Wanna Dance with Somebody (M, 144 mins) Directed by Kasi Lemmons **½

It’s been more than a decade since Whitney Houston died. And yet her image and her voice – in North America especially – are still everywhere.

Houston achieved a level of stardom that might never be eclipsed. She released seven consecutive No. 1 singles – something that Elvis and The Beatles didn’t achieve – and has sold more than 200 million albums. She appeared in films and TV shows, sang for Nelson Mandela and paved the way for Black women to have their music played on MTV and mainstream commercial radio. Something that was shamefully rare, even as recently as the 1980s.

By the late 1990s, Houston’s career had faded. There were belated comebacks and occasional appearances, but she would never repeat the success she found in the decade from 1985 to 1995. She drowned in a bath at the Beverly Hills Hilton, while getting ready for a 2012 Grammy Awards party to be held that evening. Her death was ruled as accidental, with cocaine use and heart disease contributing factors.

READ MORE:
* Top Gun: Maverick, Whina and Moonage Daydream among the films I truly loved this year
* Whitney Houston’s hologram revue sounds great, looks lifelike and is still super creepy
* Whitney: A heartfelt, heartbreaking look at a pop-star’s rise and fall
* ‘It was time to stop’ : Why Kevin Macdonald revealed Whitney Houston’s sex abuse

Writing a script of a life is thankless. Real lives don’t follow the tidy arcs of big screen dramas. But if you stray too far from the truth, your film might fail to win over the fans who are presumably the natural audience for any biopic.

Kiwi writer Anthony McCarten walks a careful line with I Wanna Dance With Somebody, skipping over the creative emptiness at the end of Houston’s life with a deft little exchange between Houston and a kindly, star struck bartender, who tells her he was in the audience at the American Music Awards in 1994, when Houston performed what became known as The Impossible Medley.

“Honey,” replies Houston. “That was 18 years ago.” I Wanna Dance With Somebody grinds to a halt about 10 minutes later.

The journey there is a frustrating one. McCarten sticks to the facts and the actual timeline of Houston’s life here, closer than he did with his script for Bohemian Rhapsody – the Freddy Mercury and Queen biopic of 2018. Houston’s early career, her relationship with Robyn Crawford and her meteoric rise once she came under the management of industry legend Clive Davis are all laid out in a matter-of-fact way. The drinking and drug use that would lead to Houston’s decline are introduced as clunkily as ever. But I don’t know of any film that ever quite made that narrative step without stumbling.

In the lead, Naomi Ackie (The End of the F****** World) is phenomenal. Ackie has to show us Houston across decades and at every emotional extreme – from starry-eyed teenager-in-love to anxiety-ridden middle-age and addiction – but she does it all so well that I stopped seeing the acting and just accepted Ackie as Houston. Around Ackie, a strong ensemble are all fine in support, with Stanley Tucci a Best Supporting Actor nomination-certainty as Clive Davis and Clarke Peters (The Wire) getting good mileage out of Houston’s dad.

Where I Wanna Dance With Somebody fails is, well, everywhere else. Despite the script ticking all the boxes it needs to and the leading role being quite brilliantly played, the film just hardly ever entertains or impresses us.

Director Kasi Lemmons and cinematographer Barry Ackroyd somehow make everything a little under-lit and cheap. Every interior set looks like painted plywood and even the big musical numbers barely come to life. The sound is wonderful, of course, but the images on screen are unambitious and pedestrian. Houston’s break-out 1983 performance on The Merv Griffin Show looks as though it is happening in cramped lounge. Only the 1994 American Music Awards show looks anything like as spectacular as it should. But most of the shots in that sequence are direct recreations of the television broadcast.

As a jukebox musical of a life, I Just Wanna Dance With Somebody is serviceable, respectful and watchable. But, if you are expecting the film to ever blow the roof off and burn the house down in the way that any biopic of Whitney Houston occasionally should, you’ll be disappointed.

I Wanna Dance with Somebody is now screening in cinemas nationwide.