Whitney Houston: Can this Rocketman-style biopic do justice to a flawed, fascinating woman?

One thesis about Whitney Houston’s tragic story argues that the singer was, from the moment she secured a record contract, buffed and polished to the extent that the real, flawed, fascinating human inside got obscured. Whatever else you might say in favour of this by-the-numbers biopic – no lessons have been learned from Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story – you would find it hard to argue that it much roughens up what we already know. It feels as if the image manipulation is still at work.

The screenplay from Anthony McCarten, who also wrote the not dissimilar Bohemian Rhapsody, is, of course, forced to acknowledge her struggles with drugs. It goes some way to rectifying the whitewashing of her relationship with her assistant Robyn Crawford. But it still feels as if we’re more often with the sunny icon in the blue eyeliner on the cover of 1987′s unavoidable Whitney album than we are with the real human being who lived, breathed and died tragically young.

[ ‘When Whitney married Bobby we were all, like, What about Robyn?’ ]

Kasi Lemmons’s picture powers us to success at a fair old rate. We see the young Houston (Naomi Ackie) getting along reasonably well with her mother, Cissy (Ashton Sanders), a renowned gospel singer, and a little less sunnily with her father, John (Clarke Peters), a patriarch of the old school.

Following some good-natured shenanigans that may or may or not have happened, the head of Arista records, Clive Davis (Stanley Tucci), is manoeuvred before Whitney and, stunned by The Voice, signs her without pause. Songwriters are hired. Hits come quickly. Before long she is unavoidable.

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The screenplay feels as if it has been rigorously honed to allow everyone living the odd flaw, but no flaw so awful as to cause serious distress. Davis, a producer on the film, will be happy to see confirmation of how vital he was to every step in Houston’s progress. The film is at pains, in its later stages, to push back against accusations that Bobby Brown (Ashton Sanders), eventually Houston’s husband, was responsible for her drug use. With nobody else around, Whitney assures him she was using before ever he came on the scene. All of which may be fair and true.

Neither Lemmons’s direction nor McCarten’s screenplay can inject any great interest into the creation of the music. The best parts of Respect, the recent so-so Aretha Franklin biopic, were those covering the building up of that vertebra-rattling sound with the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section. Only a cloth-ear would deny the pop potency of records such as How Will I Know or I Wanna Dance with Somebody, but they are just not interesting in same way that Respect or (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman are interesting. The sound seemed plucked from the shelf.

What saves the movie from utter blandness is a strong, occasionally eccentric performance from Naomie Ackie. The Londoner is, quite reasonably, given the sort of voice we’re dealing with here, not required to sing, but she makes the most of the dialogue sequences to create a vulnerable personality who too quickly becomes a victim of unimaginable success.

[ The sad, secret life of Whitney Houston ]

Such recent through-the-life biopics – the best of which is surely Rocketman – owe much of their success to their jukebox qualities, and Ackie fakes it for all she is worth performing I Will Always Love You in newly liberated South Africa or The Star Spangled Banner at the Super Bowl. The cuts to shots of beaming sports fans with hands on hearts may, in that latter sequence, be a bit icky for European viewers, but the sheer potency of the voice still knocks one back.

I Wanna Dance with Somebody plays by the rules of the TV movie to efficient, if scarcely groundbreaking, effect. It will change no minds about Whitney Houston. The true horrors of her substance abuse colour only one brief scene, and it somehow manages to engineer a triumphant last set piece. But the film will do well enough for an unthreatening fiftysomething evening out. Singalong versions are surely on the way.

I Wanna Dance With Somebody is on general release from Friday, December 30th