Editor’s Note: Vanyaland Film Editor Nick Johnston is out in Park City, Utah, covering the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. Scan through our full coverage of Sundance reviews from this year’s festival as they go live, and check out our full archives of past editions.
Biographical rock docs have one fatal flaw: They’re competing with Wikipedia. Unless you do something dramatically different or tell a relatively unknown story, your audience is normally pretty limited to the artist’s fans and maybe a few curious folks looking for a primer, being summaries and overviews of a career like one of those big-head “Who Was…” children’s books that line the shelves at a Barnes & Noble. There’s little inherently thrilling about these flicks, which is why when you hear the phrase “rock doc,” you think of classics like Gimme Shelter, The Last Waltz, or Woodstock — they’re event-centric and make you want to be there. It’s an uphill battle, and it takes a rare blend of artist and filmmaker in order to make the form elicit more than a “Huh!” when the credits roll. Dawn Porter’s Luther: Never Too Much, one of the first big docs about Luther Vandross, is one of those movies — it’s a gorgeous and lovely tribute to one of the 20th Century’s most influential (and omnipresent) artists, who was taken from us far, far too early.
You won’t be too shocked to learn that Jamie Foxx is both a producer and a talking head here — after all, the dude minted his music career with a feature on a Kanye/Twista song that both name-checked Vandross in the lyrics and sampled one of his most iconic tracks — and it’s his presence that clues you into the tone. This movie is almost effortlessly charming: Drawing from a wide pool of interviews, both in the present day with Vandross’s closest friends and folks influenced by him as well as archival footage of him on, say, Oprah, and live performances, it flows so well through the biographical details of his life, illustrating so many facets of who the man was. It does hit that Behind the Music-style sadness later on, but it does so strategically after blowing one’s mind with the man’s talent, personality, and humor. One bit of concert footage, taken after Eddie Murphy made jokes about Vandross being a potential spokesman for KFC, has the singer take out a comically oversized Fried Chicken bucket on stage during the concert and sing probably the single-greatest rendition of that jingle that you’ll ever hear.
Jingles play more of a role here than you might expect, which is why I used the word “omnipresent” in the opening: Vandross had a massive impact on music. He got his first big break as a singer in a Harlem teen soul group, he and the rest of the ensemble found themselves performing for a TV director who had a crazy idea for a new kids’ show, one taking in a place that just looked like Harlem, just with a little more magic. That show was Sesame Street, and Porter shows a good deal of wonderful footage from the show’s first seasons, highlighting his contributions. From then, he got hired to sing backup vocals for David Bowie on Young Americans, and the two of them hit it off — Vandross gave him a song, which would ultimately become “Fascination,” Bowie would credit him as a vocal arranger for all of his input on the record, and the two would tour together, with Vandross opening for Bowie, as the Thin White Duke wanted him to get fully comfortable being stage-ready as a solo performer. But for years after that, he worked as one of the most in-demand backup singers, working with Chic, Roberta Flack, Dionne Warwick, Aretha Franklin, and countless other artists. He then sang jingles — any commercial break in the early ‘80s contained a pre-fame Luther Vandross on vocals.
Eventually, he decided to go from backup to frontman: After one early attempt at leading a group called Luther, he finally struck out on his own in the ‘80s and created earworm after earworm, sung with a smooth yet deep beauty. That’s where Foxx comes in, emphasizing just how well a Vandross track — I genuinely just want to call him “Luther” every single time I write this last name — was at sealing the deal on a date. Writing about his talents is inherently difficult because Vandross had a voice that just busts superlatives wide-open, buffeted by his keen sense of how to craft pop and soul perfection. “Never Too Much,” which is so already memorable that it’s in the damn title of Porter’s doc, is one of my all-time favorite singles by any artist, being one of the most joyful expressions of sweet and mature love ever pressed to wax, so I was already in the bag when he breaks it big with that song. Yet it’s every other bit of concert footage — him figuring out how to make the Carpenters’ “Superstar” soulful (and working his commands to the band into the song itself) or making Warwick cry with his rendition of “A House is Not a Home” at the ’88 NAACP awards, which, when she recounts the moment in an interview with Porter, nearly causes her to break down in tears again — that makes this just so damn wonderful to watch.
The issues that Vandross had in his life — his sexuality, his fluctuating weight, the car crash that saw him tried for vehicular manslaughter in the ‘80s — are handled with a grace that doesn’t feel like Porter brought the kid gloves out. This carries over to its final moments, when Vandross had his stroke in 2004, and it’s presented here in a fashion that makes it one of the most devastating things I’ve ever seen in one of these documentaries: A man so full of joy and life, reduced to a shell of himself. But Luther: Never Too Much is a celebration of that life and the joy it brought to millions of listeners worldwide that manages an extraordinary feat: It places Luther and his work in context and allows the viewer to see the web of influence that he weaved. Few of its peers — especially with a subject that’s passed on — can say that they’ve single-handedly altered the perception of the artist they’re depicting in a good way, but what Porter’s done here is a genuine accomplishment. She’s made a tribute that serves as a kind of gospel, spreading the good word about what Luther did even to those who love his music but might not have known how great he was.
After all, as cited in the doc, there’s a reason why you know they’re talking about Vandross when anybody says his first name. Idris Elba and the BBC be damned, there’s only one Luther worth talking about. And you won’t be able to get enough of him here.