"The Aretha Franklin biopic Respect, from 2021, is a standard-issue piece of awards bait, but it comes alive when Franklin, played by Jennifer Hudson, enters the studio in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, casting off years of micromanagement by record labels who tried to package her as a demure chanteuse, and seizing control of her own artistic voice. As Hudson belts out " I Never Loved a Man (the Way That I Love You)," the house band following her lead and urging her on,"
"Respect gives us the why of Franklin's musical emancipation: She was just out of a long contract with Columbia Records, the label that had turned her protean talents away from the gospel music she was raised on toward smooth-jazz standards, and nearing the end of her marriage to an abusive man she wed when she was only 19. But the why isn't as interesting as the how, the thing that movies are uniquely equipped to bring alive."
Thrilling artist biopics recreate the moment of artistic creation by showing the work happening in real time. Respect comes alive when Aretha Franklin rejects label micromanagement and seizes control in the Muscle Shoals studio, letting a performance render her artistic self. Respect explains Franklin's musical emancipation through a long Columbia contract and a collapsing marriage, but cinematic power resides in showing how creation unfolds. Scott Cooper's Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is framed more around why Springsteen moved away from commercial success to record Nebraska's stark ballads alone in a rented house, even though the how of that recording is essential to the album.
Read at Slate Magazine
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