Movie of the Week: “Memphis”

If there were still an award category for Best Musical, Tim Sutton’s film “Memphis” (which I discuss in this clip) would have deserved it when it was released last year. It stars a musician, Willis Earl Beal, who plays a musician named Willis Earl Beal, but it never makes clear where the real-life Beal and the on-screen character coincide and where they differ. The character is a young bluesman whose career, after early success, is stuck, and he wanders his home town, among friends and acquaintances, among familiar places and new ones, in search of inspiration, in search of tranquility, in search of himself. The movie is filled with music, and it arrives in surprising forms—sometimes as on-screen performance, sometimes as additions to the soundtrack, which are done with a remarkable sense of imagination cued to Sutton’s conception of Willis’s character and conflicts. But the greater music still—the music that, even more than Willis’s own, sets the tone for the entire film—is that of Sutton’s images, realized by the cinematographer Chris Dapkins. “Memphis” would be as great a musical even without its soundtrack.