Questlove’s Sly Lives! Is a Revealing Portrait of the Hazards of Genius

Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s Oscar-winning music documentary Summer of Soul (…or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2021. Because that year’s pandemic-impaired fest was held online, the movie never really got the blow-your-head-off, big-screen experience it so richly deserved. That fact was highlighted last night by Sundance festival director Eugene Hernandez as he introduced the director’s latest, Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius), which in some ways is a film even better suited to the big screen than the previous one.

Sly Lives! looks at the life and career of the legendary Sly Stone, born Sylvester Stewart, who in the late 1960s and early ’70s revolutionized multiple genres of music and effectively created his own. As the film explains, Sly & the Family Stone was that rarest of things for its period: a mixed band made up of Blacks and whites, women and men. And the music itself reflected the eclectic, many-voiced quality of the group, even though most of it was written, conceived, and engineered by Stone, a wunderkind producer, DJ, and multi-instrumentalist. Borrowing from gospel, folk, big band, blues, British invasion, and psychedelia, this supercharged human furnace of inspiration thumbed his nose at the regimented nature of the music industry. And his timing, coming on the heels of the ’60s and reflecting the possibility and dissonance of its aftermath, could not have been more ideal.

Like so many rock docs, Sly Lives! is both a tribute and a cautionary tale. It’d be impossible for it not to be. Stone’s meteoric rise eventually led to a long, slow comedown, as the rocker became more erratic, showing up late to concerts and eventually not showing up at all. The drugs took over, and run-ins with the law increased. But instead of somberly charting Sly’s decline, Behind the Music-style, Questlove (working again with his Summer of Soul collaborator, producer Joseph Patel) wonders whether the musician collapsed under the burden of Black genius — a sense that he had to be all things to all people, an obviously impossible task made more impossible by the fact that he was never allowed to change and explore other identities the way white artists like David Bowie could. And was his decline fed by a culture that loves to see artists and geniuses, especially Black ones, brought down?

Amid the talking heads are artists like D’Angelo, Vernon Reid, and Andre 3000, who struggle to define the concept of Black genius when Questlove first presents it to them. That’s a sly way (sorry) of presenting a thesis that is less a cold, hard analysis and more a sociocultural vibe, something unquantifiable — made perhaps even more unquantifiable by the fact that Sly Stone himself was often evasive of broad questions about what he represented and what he was after. In his interview clips, we sense a restlessness, a man who wants to create but also maybe be left alone. (Of course, in these interviews he’s also sometimes, as one bandmate puts it, “high as a Georgia pine.”) That he can’t articulate his anxieties is understandable. “There is no blueprint for what comes next,” observes historian Mark Anthony Neal, addressing Sly’s precarious, early ’70s superstardom. “There’s never been a Black Elvis.” And movies need not answer the questions they pose. Sometimes, asking and letting the questions hang in the air is enough.

The real power of Sly Lives! lies in its presentation of Stone’s most iconic hits, which Questlove often lets play all the way through as his interview subjects dissect the songs and the imagery associated with them. The film has been built largely out of archival footage and talking heads — on paper, a standard, maybe even uninspired, approach for modern documentaries. But here, they’ve been edited together into montages that are both dynamic and revealing. The MVP is legendary producer Jimmy Jam, who dives into the details of why these songs work such magic on us. He breaks down the delectable mixture of bass lines and guitar licks on “Dance to the Music,” and how they combined with the unison vocals and the harmony vocals, as each band member essentially gets his or her moment in the song before it all comes together. Later, he analyzes the odd, unresolved tension at the heart of “Stand!”, the way the song seems to build towards a climax that never comes, until it suddenly gives way to something totally different at the very end.

For all the sociocultural ruminations of Sly Lives!, it’s the shop-talk that inspires. Bassist Larry Graham, Jr. explains how he came up with his distinctive playing style as a young man because, at the time, he had no access to drums. Later, drummer Greg Errico goes into how Sly used a simple Rhythm King drum machine to replace him after Errico left the band; such technology was looked down on by artists, but Sly clipped the beats in such a distinctive way that he invented a whole new sound. Jimmy Jam explaining, in precise detail, how he sampled a guitar bridge from Sly’s “Thank You” into the funk-background of Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” prompted a burst of applause from my audience. Honestly, it helps when musicians make movies about other musicians. You walk out of Sly Lives! feeling like you’ve genuinely learned something, but you also walk out exhilarated.