American Symphony

Snapshot of Jon Batiste and Suleika Jaouad

Streaming on: Netflix

Language: English

CC: English

Genre: Biographical documentary, Music, Emotional

Content warnings: Lukemia

Alright dear readers my last review was a "loosely based on" story and we're doing a 180 in this one to dive into "American Symphony" the biographical documentary about a year in the life of musician Jon Batiste and his wife, writer Suleika Jaouad. There's a content warning on this one that to give you a heads up that it features her struggles and treatments for lukemia. In this day and age we don't give nearly enough content warnings for medical traumas. As someone who has spent my life in and out of hospitals, doctor's offices, and now tele-healthcare calls I know I wax and wan in my ability to engage with or even witness anyone navigating our overworked, understaffed, underpaid, overpriced, highly problematic American healthcare system. If you, dear reader, are outside the US and reading this please understand our healthcare system is an absolute wreck. I'm not really sure there's ever been a time it wasn't - but that my friends is a topic for another day and probably a different blog. Let's put the focus back on "American Symphony".

Reviewing documentaries is a different kind of beast - it's not about critiquing the story, though it may be about critiquing the story telling. It's not about analyzing the casting choices, though there's room for critique of reenactments in some documentaries. I feel like reviewing documentaries takes on an exploration of connection like any other film or piece of media though. Connection to the story of another or others. Connection to aspects of humanity and humility. Connection to someone you've likely never met before and may never met in your life. "American Symphony" is such a deeply connective work of art. Showing what it can be like to create art, what it can be like to astound and surprise yourself, what it can be like to have a complicated journey, what it can be like to hold space for a beloved going through the unthinkable, and so very very much more.

A part of Jon Batiste's journey is so well captured by Matthew Heineman. It feels so deeply intimate and there are so many scenes that I wanted to say something in response to Jon or Suleika. The ways he speaks about his wife are so very very full of love and admiration - and yeah her book "Between Two Kingdoms a Memoir of a Life Interrupted" is on it's way to my house by the time this review gets published. When she mentions not knowing how to hold such extremes (as an example her first day of chemo also being the day Jon's 11 Grammy nominations were announced) just punched me in the gut. I've said those words so very very many times in my own life and that's not ever going to change for me. That attempt to hold such extremes in life... to be so radically aware that you live a life of contrasts... yeah y'all this one definitely had me reaching for the tissues multiple times. This one is so beautifully filmed, edited, and generally expressed... this has earned a new place on my list of Beloved films. For the record - I don't do favorites, I do Beloved.

Jon Baptiste is such an amazing artist and this biographical documentary really just honors, highlights, and lets all of us watching have an opportunity to momentarily bathe in that experience. His views on music, on art, on collaboration, on what being alive really means (contrasts, juxtapositions, extremes) is such a beautifully welcome slice of time in the chaos of existing today. I absolutely spent a quarter if not a half of this film in tears. As a femme living with something that is (slowly) destroying my body from the inside out... partnered to a gent that is genius in his own right (with his own mental health struggles)... moving through an existence full of challenges and anxiety but looking for the hope and "just doing it" in seemingly equal measures. This one hit home. It's actually really rare to see these kinds of echoes of my own life presented in a film for others to see and feel. And Suleika and I aren't even on the same journey through life. Yet I hear myself in her journey. I hear myself in Jon's journey when he talks about "feeling the stakes", the ones from the outside and society as much as the ones we place on ourselves.

I also look forward to the future art and explorations from Suleika, this film gave me a taste, and this film was an exploration and revelation of one year in the journey of Jon Baptist. Her book will no doubt take me further along her journey... but I'm telling you here there is more wisdom, wonder, and wiles to be brought to us by this amazing human. This amazing woman. In the meantime I'll be over here waiting for that book to arrive and bathing in the reminders of the exquisite juxtapositions my life is full of.

By the way "American Symphony" is up for an Oscar/Academy Award for for the song “It Never Went Away,” featured in this heart-touching film in the end credits.

Quote of Impact:

"There's room for all of us to coexist. There's a space for us all to be different and quirky and strange and beautiful together."