American Symphony (2023)

I am sorry that this movie did not make the cut from the short list of Best Documentary to the nominated list this past year, but it is a very good documentary. It follows Jon Batiste, Stephen Colbert’s band leader and the Oscar winner for the movie "soul", for a year. I think to start it was to see the creative process unfold, which does happen, but what also happens is that the musician's long time partner, Suleika Jaouad, author of Between Two Kingdoms about her diagnosis and recovery from leukemia, marries him and then her cancer relapses. So there is the creation and the pain, the growth and the contraction of their lives. Batiste comes across as both visionary and very human. I read a review that knocked this as not going deeply enough into either the creative process that went into Batiste's American Symphony nor into the fear and grief that cancer begets, but having walked on the path of the later, both personally and with a loved one, this is pretty evocative of that process, and how to do it authentically but also to survive it. I really enjoyed this.