Michel Gondry’s film of Dave Chappelle’s free 2004 concert on a Brooklyn corner is warm, funny and constantly interrupting its own music. The songs are strong and the host is better; you will wish the cameras had stayed on the stage a little longer.
In September 2004, with a large television contract newly signed, Dave Chappelle decided to throw a free concert on a street corner in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, and to invite everyone he liked. Michel Gondry, who had just made Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, came along with cameras. The result is 100 minutes of a good afternoon, which keeps cutting away from the songs to see what the host is up to. If the music is yours, it is an easy evening. If it is not, Chappelle alone is nearly enough.
He is the best thing in it, and not when he is on stage. Gondry follows him around his home patch in Ohio handing out golden tickets to people who have no idea who is on the bill: a woman behind a shop counter, a group of lads outside it, a college marching band whose directors look at him as though he has offered them the moon. Chappelle is quick, courteous and interested in the answers, and he gets more laughs here, off the cuff, than most comedians manage with a script.
The bill is one particular strand of American hip-hop and soul, and a strong one. Erykah Badu, Common, Talib Kweli and Yasiin Bey (billed here as Mos Def), with Bilal, Cody ChestnuTT and Lil’ Cease in support, and, reunited on one stage, Lauryn Hill, Wyclef Jean, Pras Michel and Jerry Duplessis of the Fugees. The sound is recorded live, in the open air, and it is rough in the way that suits it.
Ellen Kuras shoots it handheld, in daylight, with no lighting rig, so the performers are lit by whatever the sky gives them and the crowd is always in the frame. Lauri Faggioni’s stage is a scaffold across the road, and the backdrop is the neighbourhood: a nursery, and next to it a house a couple have been building by hand for decades and cheerfully lend to the production. Nothing has been dressed. That is the point, and it works.
The trouble is the cutting. Three editors, Jamie Kirkpatrick, Sarah Flack and Jeff Buchanan, have to hold a day-long concert, a week of preparation and a trip to Ohio in a hundred minutes, and their solution is to leave almost nothing whole. A song starts, gets a verse, and then we are in a rehearsal room or a doorway, and by the time we come back the chorus has gone. For a comedy that would be fine. For a concert film it means the picture keeps interrupting the one thing it has brought us to see, and we were irritated at being taken away from Badu just as she got going.
And yet. When the Ohio band arrives on the Brooklyn corner in full uniform and marches into a crowd that has never heard of them, we were caught off guard. It moved us more than we had any right to expect from a marching band. The reason is plain: Chappelle has spent the first half of the film promising ordinary people a day out, and here is the day, and here are the people, and every face on the pavement is doing what ours was. Gondry and Kuras hold on them. It is the one stretch where the film stops fidgeting.
The film catches Chappelle at a particular moment. He mentions the contract, and he seems both delighted by it and a little worn, a man who has plainly decided that the thing to do with money is spend it on other people. He plays host rather than star, and the film is better for it.
Against Wattstax (1973) and Stop Making Sense (1984), it is untidy; those trusted the stage and stayed on it. This one wants to be a concert, a portrait and a scrapbook and only fully manages the last. Watch it at home with the sound up and the neighbours warned, and accept that you will want more of nearly every song. That is a complaint, but it is the kind you make about a good party.
