Morgan Neville’s documentary lets the women who sang behind the Rolling Stones, Sting and Phil Spector be heard on their own, and when it does that it is thrilling. The rest is warm, loosely shaped and quick to change the subject when the questions get hard.
Morgan Neville has made a film about the people who stand a little behind the star and sing the part you remember. His subjects are Darlene Love, Merry Clayton, Lisa Fischer and Claudia Lennear, all of them Black women who came up through church choirs and into the studios of Los Angeles, and Judith Hill, a generation younger, who is trying to get from the back of the stage to the front. Around them the stars queue up to give credit: Mick Jagger, Sting, Bette Midler, Sheryl Crow. It is a good idea for a documentary and a generous one, and for 89 minutes it is a pleasure to sit in front of. It is also loosely built, and it walks away from the hardest questions it raises.
The method is the interview and the clip. Graham Willoughby and Nicola Marsh film the women at home, in rehearsal rooms and, in the best sequences, in a studio with the old tapes running, so that a singer can sit and listen to herself at 22. Kevin Klauber, Jason Zeldes and Douglas Blush have a deep archive to cut against, and they cut it on the beat, which sounds easy and is not. Plenty of music documentaries treat the songs as wallpaper. This one lets them play.
The moment the film will be remembered for is Clayton and Gimme Shelter. Neville takes the Rolling Stones out of the mix and leaves her vocal by itself, a track she recorded, by her own account, in the middle of the night in 1969 after being called out of bed. Her voice cracks on the top note and carries on. We had heard the song a few hundred times. We had never heard her, and when the tape ran out we found we had gone quite still. Clayton, listening to herself, says nothing for a moment, and neither did anyone near us.
Love’s story is the film’s other spine. She sang leads for Phil Spector that were released under other groups’ names, watched other women mime them on television, and was cleaning houses in middle age before she got back on a stage. Neville tells it straight and lets her tell most of it, which is the right call; she is funny about it, and she has earned the right to be. Fischer is the quiet centre. She has the voice and not the appetite, she is still on the road behind Jagger and Sting, and she seems content. The film is briefly unsure whether to admire that or feel sorry about it, and it settles, rightly, on admiration.
What it does not settle is the argument it keeps starting. The film says plainly that the singers were mostly Black and the stars they sang behind mostly white, and that the money went one way; then it changes the subject. Nobody from a record company sits down in front of the camera. Sting offers a thought about luck and the film accepts it as a conclusion. Hill’s present-day thread is meant to hold the whole thing together, but Neville keeps checking in on her the way a television programme checks in on a contestant, and the shape feels imposed rather than found. The stories arrive in overlapping fragments, so that by the end we knew everyone’s voice and only some of their lives. It is 89 minutes long and still finds time to repeat itself.
Music documentaries of this kind usually have one of two faults: too many famous heads talking, or too much reverence. This has a little of both and gets away with it because the singing is that good. Most critics have taken it for the celebration it wants to be, and we do not think they are wrong so much as kind; we came out humming and still wanted to know where the money went.
Watch it with the volume higher than you would normally allow, and stop it when Clayton sings. Everything the film has to say is in those two minutes, and it says it there better than anywhere else.
