In the opening and closing moments of Spinning Gold, a fizzy confection of musical montage in the shape of a movie, we get glimpses of leading man Jeremy Jordan’s own talent for song and dance. He cavorts with a gospel choir and serenades a stadium from a grand piano, but both of these scenes belong to the fantasy life of the film’s main subject. Neil Bogart was the impresario behind Casablanca Records, and the film would have us believe that he was responsible for discovering and popularizing some of the biggest acts of the 1970s. The roster makes for the unlikeliest of jukeboxes: Gladys Knight, Bill Withers, the Isley Brothers, KISS and Donna Summer. Throw in the Village People and Parliament just for the hell of it. If nothing else, the soundtrack is killer.
Bogart’s own son, Timothy Scott Bogart, wrote and directed this movie, which may explain its tone of hero worship for a flawed but brilliant protagonist who persevered through insurmountable odds through faith in himself and his vision. Whether you think that’s the real story is probably related to whether you still think your dad could beat up Superman. Still, some people really do seem to lead lives of improbable glamor and influence, and the facts make a decent case that Neil Bogart was a genuinely fascinating cat with the ability to see potential where others couldn’t. The result is this biopic (with all the cliches and pitfalls of the genre) of a guy most of us have never heard of but whose impact on popular music was immense.
The film frames Bogart’s struggle for creative success as a financial one, with numbers on-screen detailing the ever-mounting debt of his independent record label. A true believer in the rightness of his own taste, he never expresses doubts about the acts he takes under contract, and continually doubles-down on his bets. It’s a Capitalist fantasia of redemption in the form of gold records, stacks of money and radio play. After all, the audience already knows that his bets will eventually pay off–that’s why you can sing along with every song in every scene.
From the on-stage theatrics of glam-metal weirdos KISS to the disco anthems of Donna Summer and Parliament’s funky mothership jams, large parts of the film are given over to dramatizations of musical performances. Sometimes these depict moments of inspiration in the recording studio, other times it’s against a backdrop of stadium crowds. These recreations are fun to watch and must have been a blast to film, but they don’t particularly serve the forward momentum of the story. Bogart, defending his risky investments, speaks in platitudes and inspirational slogans in between delivering twinkly-eyed speeches about believing in the music–unless he’s on coke or bottoming out, and then he professes the same confidence through tears. The emotional tone is about as subtle as KISS’s stage makeup. The script has an array of supporting characters delivering lines as if from cue cards drawn from a small set of themes, and no one seems to have any kind of life outside of their relationship with the protagonist.
Bogart is depicted as a guy who put himself at the center of the world he invented, and what makes the film work as well as it does is the lead performance. Jeremy Jordan as Bogart possesses all the charisma and oozy charm you might expect from a hot-shot music producer who knows what he wants and usually gets it. With a period-appropriate perm and polyester suits, he struts with purpose, hypnotizing those around him with his visions of success. The film wouldn’t work at all without an actor who can credibly pull off that kind of magnetism, and Jordan does. Even when delivering clunky lines or improbably seducing Donna Summer in the studio so she can nail her vocal, Bogart is always interesting to watch.
What ends up dragging the movie down is the sense of endless montage as the focus skips between scenes like a needle jumping across a record from one song to the next. Few scenes last long enough to develop much depth, and then the next song kicks in and some flashy editing whooshes us into another moment. In its kinetic zeal but shallow storytelling, Spinning Gold is a bit like disco music itself: great fun, but not to be taken too seriously.
Photo courtesy of Variance Films
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