Sly Stone, founder, frontman and namesake of Sly and the Family Stone, has deserved to be the subject of a documentary since the heyday of his eponymous, chart-topping, mixed-gender, racially integrated 1960s and ‘70s funk band. After more than 30 years out of the spotlight — and another 10 in which his personal and legal troubles sadly dominated more headlines than his music — Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s “Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius)” aims to rightfully contextualize his artistic legacy.
The film bows at Sundance Jan. 23.
Appropriately, the documentarian and fellow musician chronicles Stone’s musical achievements, the cultural barriers he broke and the ups and downs of his tumultuous private life. But Questlove unexpectedly leans heavier on his title’s parenthetical addendum in order to illuminate some deeper truths about the challenges of stardom (especially for Black artists) that may have started with Stone, but which still persist today.
“This film was sort of the lightest, least passive-aggressive way that I can have an intervention talk with all of my peers without me grabbing them by the lapel,” Questlove tells Variety.
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In the service of this “cinematic intervention,” the filmmaker spoke at length with Family Stone members Cynthia Robinson, Jerry Martini and Larry Graham, collaborators and descendants like George Clinton, Nile Rodgers and Jimmy Jam, as well as Questlove’s own contemporaries D’Angelo and André 3000. “The most common feedback that I’ve gotten from people who’ve seen this film [was], ‘We saw the look in their eyes once they realized that they weren’t here to talk about the harmony structures of “Everyday People.”’”
Questlove suggests that the most telling detail about how open he expected his interviewees to be was how many prospective contributors declined to participate. “For a lot of us not being used to being vulnerable — especially the kind of society that we’re in right now, where your life is wide open for criticism and up for review — I found out in these two and a half years that this particular subject is probably the most frightening of all, revealing the hurt that’s underneath the facade of the smile,” he says. Even those who agreed to get involved were surprised by how intimate his lines of questioning proved to be.
“André is probably the one that was the most excited to make this a therapeutic moment for him,” he says. “But even for the members of the band, there are moments where they’re like, ‘Wait a minute, you didn’t tell me I was going to therapy.’”
Because the filmmaker did not speak with the famously reclusive Stone himself, he mainly utilizes period interviews — and in particular a no-holds-barred 1982 conversation between the singer and Maria Shriver — to enable him to narrate and comment upon much of his own story. As both a documentarian and frequent interviewee himself, Questlove says that he’s learned that using contemporary observations, especially from a subject, aren’t necessarily the best way to pinpoint their impact. “For the purposes of the storytelling, he was effective in terms of speaking about his childhood, about his life, and whatnot,” he says. “But in my experience, I always think the subject is the last person to know what the aftereffect is.”
In fact, it was conversations he had with interviewees like Living Color guitarist Vernon Reid that yielded some of the most profound insights — not just about individual songs, but the underpinnings of Stone’s enduring power as a musician. “Vernon Reid’s take on [“Hot Fun in the Summertime”] was that it describes the summer that none of us ever get to experience,” he remembers. “Everything he’s talking about is a surreal fantasy, because that’s not what’s happening in 1969, but somehow Sly kind of forces this rose-colored glasses outlook. And that to me says a lot about him — the fact that, as a piano player, it’s almost like he has the right hand of a 7-year-old. Everything’s playful and happy.”
Conversely, Shriver’s interview proved to be an excellent spine for his film precisely because the then “brand-new, straight-out-the-box 22-year-old” probed Stone about a lot of things that Questlove admits he might not have been comfortable asking. “That interview, I felt, was more sobering, honest and more hard-hitting,” he says. In fact, he says that its fearlessness held up a slightly uncomfortable mirror to his own skills as a conversationalist and interviewer. “I really want to have a conversation with her about that, because of the amount of times that I’ve coddled a subject and sort of danced around a hot issue, either on my podcast or in doing these movies.
“The statement of, ‘And you blew it,’ every day I’m dying to ask,” he confesses. “I’ve just never seen someone just take a bucket of ice water and just pour it on someone.”
Despite his interest in creating a portrait that did not flinch from Stone’s eccentricities and foibles, Questlove says he felt like over-documenting them would have undermined the power of his film, much less the artist’s legacy. “What I didn’t want to do was fall into just a constant barrage of Sly fuck-up stories, because we had a lot of those,” he says. “So it was like, what’s the best, most effective 1-hour-and-48-minute story from soup to nuts that we can get that will just hit people in the gut?”
Ultimately, Questlove realized that the people whose guts he wanted to hit would not all come to “Sly Lives!” with the same level of familiarity with his subject. “Imagine, ‘I never heard of Prince, I never heard of Michael Jackson. What do he do?’ That’s how most people feel like Sly Stone,” he observes. “So when you’re dealing with that three-prong approach of serving the story, serving music dweebs, and those that have absolutely no clue of who this person is, there’s really no space for me to kind of show off.”
Unsurprisingly, he says that the painful process of killing your darlings as a filmmaker taught the seasoned musician some new lessons for when he returns to his other creative vocation. “If the next Roots album is not good, then I have not been paying attention in this process,” he jokes. “Editing films teaches you so much more about how to be effective as a storyteller than any medium that I know of.”