Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown

Like a James Brown show, the result is both generously proportioned and extremely tight.

Alex Gibney’s Mr. Dynamite: The Rise Of James Brown is an assured threading-of-the-needle, slowly working its way to the sweet spot where the man and the legend overlap.

Mr. Dynamite may finally be Gibney's most psychologically and socially perceptive film to date, at once a refreshingly even-handed view of one of the great musical minds of the 20th century and a near-pathological study of the rise of modern conservative thinking, seen through one of it's most unlikely yet dynamic supporters.

Much of the performance footage is phenomenal in that respect. But in two hours time, the film could have dug deeper rather than coming to a screeching halt that almost rivals its subject’s high-pitched stage wails.

The good stuff: To the music that nobody can take down or chip away at. To the energy and excitement and drama of a James Brown performance, from the footwork and the sweat to the drama of the moment when Brown, apparently near death from exertion, was draped with a cape and lead shuffling slowly offstage until, UNH! he would turn around, spring back to the microphone and the whole frenzy would begin again.

Mr. Dynamite isn’t hagiography, and we hear enough about Brown’s personal flaws to make him quite human.

Though neither naive nor mum about its subject's destructive complications and contradictions, his brutal youth and abuse of women, Alex Gibney's film concentrates on Brown the performer--both as a musician and as a public political personage, the voice of black pride (say it loud!) and economic self-sufficiency.

This is a smart, informative and compassionate look at the artist known as the Godfather of Soul, whose music changed America.

Mr. Dynamite instead works best as musical biography, only fitfully as a comprehensive one.

The film glosses over the turbulent aspects of Brown's personal life (domestic-abuse charges and an arrest record are mentioned in passing), and it isn't comprehensive (there's nothing about his four wives, six children, drug addiction or his death in 2006). But the tuneful feature-length film is packed with great vintage clips.

It’s a documentary of episodes more than something that builds, although that’s sometimes inherent in the biographical doc genre.