A Major Disappointment

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Please be advised gentle viewer that this is not a documentary -- it is a sinkhole. Or, maybe more precisely stated, it is a film in the guise of a documentary, that was created by sinkholes. To even call it a film gives this thing more credit than due... it feels more like a lot of data (I'd be hard-pressed to call it "information") presented on a winding-sheet designed to mummify (in the sense of obscuring and shriveling, not in preserving) the good memory of a flawed genius. One of the most glaring problems is the fact that throughout the downward spiral of its confused, tortuous paces, it can't decide whether it wants to treat its storied subject with care or contempt. Here Jimi Hendrix is alternately fawned over, luridly sensationalized, and then -- mystifyingly Jekyll and Hyde-like -- demeaned or debauched, then even grossly humiliated(!) in some of the reenactments of the discovery and handling of his expired body. Utterly classless stuff, do be warned. That alone would be reason enough to forego this travelogue in personal disaster tourism. Yet the makers found more ways to fail, by dishing some convoluted lines of inquiry into conspiracy theory floating around Hendrix' death. I won't bother to muse over the merits (or lack thereof) therein. The visibly political-agenda-driven "experts" shown to elaborate on these theories are -- along with the creators of this reprehensible waste of time -- guilty of defiling the memory of a great musical artist and a fine man, apparently for no reason other than some perceived personal/political gain. After viewing it, I felt as if I might spit hot metal. Reprobates!