MISS SHARON JONES – Review

You may not have heard of soul singer Sharon Jones but you may have heard her catchy, bluesy tune “100 Days, 100 Nights” this past summer. The tune was used on a TV commercial and if your musical tastes are at all like mine, you too may have thought, ‘Hooo, who is that, and where can I get her albums.” Even if you missed that ear-worm song, once you see this ball-of-fire belt out a song, dancing up a storm all the while, you won’t forget her.

“MISS SHARON JONES!” is the way her band, the Dap Kings, introduce this remarkable singer to the audience at their concerts. It is also the name of a new documentary directed by Barbara Kopple. Kopple is a skilled documentarian, whose 1976 Oscar-winning HARLEN COUNTY, USA focused on a Kentucky miners’ strike and kept the cameras rolling as police fired rifles into crowds of strikers, a film considered by many critics one of the best labor films ever made.

MISS SHARON JONES! explodes with music and energy every time the dynamic Miss Jones belts one out, but the real focus of Kopple’s film is Jones’ battle with cancer. The cancer struck at a particularly bad time, just as Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings where on the verge of releasing a highly-anticipated album and the wider success they had long worked towards.

Sharon Jones has one big lush voice, a larger-than-life stage presence and an energetic performance style reminiscent of James Brown. On stage, Jones looks like a big woman yet she is actually less than five feet tall. As an ambitious, talented young woman, Jones went to Los Angeles set on becoming a star. But a recording company executive told her she would never make it because, as she recounts, she was “too fat, too black and too short.” She went home to take a job as a prison guard but kept up her singing with a band playing weddings. Years of playing weddings built a bond with her two back-up singers, who joined Jones when she was invited to front the New York-based R&B band the Dap Kings. The band has black and white musicians, who play guitar, brass and percussion instruments, and make some irresistible music blending blues, jazz, R&B, soul and other influences into their own sound. And leading it all is Sharon’s big beautiful voice and electrifying stage style.

As the band was finishing up their album “Give the People What They Want,” and preparing to hit the road touring to promote it, it was becoming clear Sharon wasn’t well. The doctor diagnosed stage 2 pancreatic cancer, a daunting diagnosis. Surgery removed her pancreas and parts of several other organs, and was followed by months of chemotherapy. Kopple follows Sharon as she recovers from surgery and goes through chemo, with the help of friends, family and band members. One difficult moment for the singer was going in to have her head shaved, as many people do now before chemo. As Sharon looks down on the locks of hair in her hands, one feels her sadness and fear. Yet when she sees her shorn head, she kind of likes it. After a brief time with a wig, the singer casts it aside and wears her baldness with a bold pride, a badge of her fight against cancer.

Performance is not the major focus of this documentary but the sprinkling of musical numbers are wonderful highlight lifting the film. Sharon is a fighter, which is obvious from her response to that record company executive’s dismissive assessment and, really, in everything she says and does. Kopple captures moments of pain, of doubt and exhaustion – this is cancer, after all – but Jones, like the Maya Angelou poem, is someone to say, “And still I rise.”

At the beginning of treatment, all Sharon wants is to get on the road. Instead she goes through chemo, and a kind of enforced inactivity to which this restless woman is not accustomed. As the chemo does its work, Sharon has time to think, some of those thoughts are shared with us in the intimate and affecting film. A trip back to the small town where she grew up, brings remembrances of happy days fishing and not so happy memories of racism. Sharon talks about how she always supported her family, even though she was the youngest of six, and of her affection for her mother, who raised them in “the projects.” One of her sisters is among the tight-knit group that surrounds her now. Jones is a feisty, out-spoken person but sometimes it is easy for people to forget just how sick this entertaining little dynamo is, and we see moments when she sags despite herself.

It is clear that Jones is one of those musicians for whom performing is a kind of drug. In one scene, she goes to a small church and is asked to sing. Chemo saps one’s strength and Jones struggled to walk up the few steps to the church door. It is obvious she intends only to sing a little, to be polite. But when she opens her mouth and her golden voice comes out, one can see and hear an electricity go through the congregation. Energized by their response, Sharon’s voice soars, she belts, she embellishes, and when she finishes, she breaks into dance. The dance begins with wild energy but as she finally sinks into a pew, we see she is near collapse. But a professional all the way, there is no faltering until she does sit down. The scene says so much about this woman’s character and drive.

The film ends on a high note, so to speak, with Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings back on stage, on their world tour for the new album and with Sharon a Grammy nominee at last. The scene is a good way to wrap the film but a medical hiccup before it foreshadows what has happened since filming concluded, as the cancer has come back and the brave Miss Jones is going through it again. But true to her nature, she’s still on stage, still being introduced with an exclamation point as Miss Sharon Jones!

MISS SHARON JONES is a wonderful film of inspiration, strength and the joy of using one’s innate talent to entertain, despite its moments of heart-ache and darkness.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

MISS SHARON JONES opens in St. Louis Friday, Sept. 16, at the Tivoli Theatre.