There have been relatively few biopics about choreographers, but it’s hard to think of a better one than “John Cranko,” about the late South African who made his name in England and Germany. Steering well clear of “Eureka!” moments and other clichés within the portrait-of-an-artist genre, Joachim A. Lang’s feature finds unusually vivid means of conveying how a driven creator’s mind works by having the dance ideas in his head constantly integrated into the everyday life depicted. With a terrific performance by Sam Riley in the title role, this handsome production — with no end of first-rate terpsichorean performance onscreen — should reignite interest in a figure whose rising international stature got curtailed by his abrupt demise in 1973, at age 45.
Lang limits himself to the years of Cranko’s finding a mature career berth with the Stuttgart Ballet. He wound up there through circumstances just briefly referred to: After moving to London to further his training and prospects in 1946, he rose to prominence with great speed, becoming resident choreographer for Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet (later the Royal Ballet) at just age 23. He had successes not just there, but directing opera and revues.
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Then in 1959, he was entrapped by an undercover police officer into arrest for “homosexual activity.” The embarrassment turned into a public scandal, and he suddenly became persona non grata, his career momentum grinding to a halt.
The film begins in 1960, when he accepted an offer to stage one of his works for the Stuttgart Ballet. Frank about his damaged reputation in England, he’s assured by the organization’s general director Walter Erich Schafer (Hanns Zischler) “that wouldn’t happen here.” This initial collaboration goes off so well, and he is immediately offered the position of artistic director — though that means pushing aside the current one, his friend Nicholas Beriozoff (Stefan Weinert). After some agonizing, Cranko agrees.
Not without conditions, however. Despite his relative youth and shaky professional standing, he is already an eccentric, demanding, mercurial and stubborn personality who will work in his own peculiar fashion or not at all. This immediately ruffles feathers when he clashes with the resident prima ballerina (who flatly dismisses his choreography as “not my style”), then insists on replacing her with Marcia Haydee (Elisa Badenes), a Brazilian dancer no one else is enthused about. As in many things, his questionable instincts on this matter turn out to bear brilliant results.
Riley, so tightly wound as Joy Division’s Ian Curtis in “Control” 17 years ago, goes to an impressive opposite extreme here. Adored by his dancers, a sometime headache for others, Cranko was a high-maintenance bundle of contradictions: generous, ebullient, depressive, highly cultured with a taste for rough trade, able to do focused work after having drunk enough to incapacitate a lesser mortal.
There are several instances portrayed when he cruelly insults his closest collaborators, just out of pique, then earnestly apologizes hours or moments later. He mourns his inability to find a longterm life partner, but we can see why that’s not happening: His manic highs and lows would exhaust anyone’s patience. (He eventually lives platonically with other dancer couples, mostly so they can keep a wary eye on his excesses.) Riley’s awesomely committed performance makes these warring qualities seem helplessly innate rather than showy. We believe in this figure’s German fluency just as much as we do the choreographic ideas that seem to flow out of him.
That creative imagination is also portrayed in a cleverly organic way, as we see how Cranko’s mind works. Whether in a rehearsal hall or sitting on a park bench, he constantly visualizes dancers testing out notions. A bravura sequence early on has him discussing a planned “Romeo and Juliet” with talented young set designer Jurgen Rose (Louis Gregorowicz). As they talk in one of the Stuttgart opera house’s stunning rooms, it’s flooded with performers portraying the scene of Tybalt’s death, repeatedly stopping and starting as the choreographer internally revises his vision. While some later depictions of Cranko triumphs including “Onegin,” “Initials” and “Traces” are primarily onstage montages that give limited sense of the whole piece, the film is notable for almost always photographing the whole body in motion. There’s no music video-like hyperactivity of editing or camerawork, reducing dance to fragments.
Cranko’s transformation of the company to world-class status was dubbed “the Stuttgart Miracle,” eventually leading to acclaimed debuts in established dance capitals, not least New York. Lang’s screenplay charts that ascent while maintaining a fix on the chain-smoking, workaholic protagonist’s mental and physical health. At more than one low point he attempted suicide, which was also rumored when he actually did die. It’s a little odd that the film doesn’t clarify that his death on a plane returning from an encore U.S. tour was in fact an accident, the result of an adverse reaction to a sleeping pill.
Other bothersome gaps in the script include Cranko’s pining over the departure of a lover he thinks might have been “the one” — a figure (Gerrit Klein as Alexander) so briefly met, we have no idea why he was special. The decision to exclude the protagonist’s earlier life works overall, though a couple of brief flashbacks to childhood traumas raise so many unanswered questions, they might better have been omitted entirely. As an adult, he frequently moans about negative reviews, yet we’re never given any hint what the critics objected to.
After providing so much excitement onstage and off, “John Cranko” also disappoints a bit by failing to come up with a climactic emotional note. It fact, the whole enterprise feels long as it approaches the two-hour mark, ending with a long credits sequence where the actors are seen side-by-side with those still alive among their role models. But such minor flaws don’t dim Lang’s overall achievement in throwing a complicated personality, his creative process and the international dance scene of 50 to 60 years ago into sharp relief.
With full cooperation from the current Stuttgart Ballet and other keepers of the subject’s legacy, the film’s physical resources are often spectacular, even beyond the superb dancing itself. Largely using the original locations, Philip Sichler’s widescreen photography is rich in elegance and pastel hues without ever growing excessively prettified. Though Walter Mair contributes some brief transitional scoring, the majority of music heard are excerpted classical compositions by Brahms, Britten, Verdi, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, etc., all newly recorded by the Stuttgart State Opera Orchestra.