Nina Simone: Gloriously Revived in New Netflix Documentary
The new Netflix documentary What Happened, Miss Simone? returns the extraordinary singer Nina Simone back to mass culture in a way she hasn’t been present for in decades. Director Liz Garbus had a considerable challenge — to keep the details of the life Simone led from overwhelming the presentation of her art, and Garbus succeeds in this admirably.
From the start, the film makes clear Simone was unique. A poor, classically trained pianist who had to fight both poverty and racism to make the art she heard in her head, Simone found her voice in the 1960s, performing idiosyncratic versions of pop, folk, and jazz compositions.
She became radicalized by the civil rights and black-power movements of the 1960s and early ‘70s: It’s still startling to hear the blunt ferocity in a song she performed such as “Mississippi Goddam,” about the murder of civil rights figure Medgar Evers and the bombing of a Mississippi church that killed four black children. We tend to think we live in more open, un-shockable times, but imagine how pop culture would erupt even today if a well-known pop singer recorded a song as eloquently angry called “Charleston Goddam.”
At the same time, What Happened, Miss Simone? chronicles the performer’s difficult marriage to Andrew Stroud, a former police officer who became her manager. Initially a shrewd businessman who helped position Simone as a star, Stroud becomes a figure of menace in the film, as comments from Simone, her daughter Lisa Simone Kelly, extracts from the singer’s diaries, and statements by Stroud himself attest to his sometimes-violent bullying and abuse of the singer. Garbus doesn’t shy away from the complications of Simone’s life — after the singer and her husband separated, her daughter ended up choosing to live with her father, because her mother had herself become abusive to the child.
What Happened, Miss Simone? does a great job of capturing just how tumultuous, fluid, and confusing not just Simone’s life was — she aligned herself with black revolutionary movements and, upon being introduced to Martin Luther King, told him brazenly, “I am not non-violent” — but also the culture surrounding her. In the midst of the controversies she swirled around her like one of her full-length dresses, we see Simone appear on a TV show such as Hugh Hefner’s posh pop mind-blower Playboy Penthouse, singing “I Loves You, Porgy.”
It is by allowing all the contradictions, triumphs, and sadnesses to come through in all their complexities that this documentary grants Nina Simone, who died in 2003, a new life.
What Happened, Miss Simone? is streaming on Netflix.
Ken TuckerCritic-at-Large
