In American Symphony, a moving but scattershot documentary following the recording artist Jon Batiste during a whirlwind year, the transcendent moments tend to come along when its subject is anchored to a piano.
Batiste, a musician who harmonizes between genres like jazz, classical, R&B and funk, is most famous for leading Stay Human, the house band on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and taking home Album of the Year at the 2022 Grammys. That prize pairs nicely with his Oscar for scoring Pixar’s Soul alongside Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
Batiste is a certified musical genius. That’s a given when we arrive at American Symphony’s finest moment, an early scene when Batiste is sitting at a Steinway, working out a composition alongside an unnamed trombone player for his debut at Carnegie Hall – that show is also dubbed American Symphony.
As his fingers search the keys, Batiste stumbles on some melancholic notes. “What is that?” he asks in response to a beautifully tender riff that both he and the trombone player immediately seize on. They listen patiently and intently, playing the notes over, the trombone joining the piano as they keep exploring what it’s meant to be. It’s a magical and soulful bit, echoing some philosophical bars Batiste drops earlier in the film about how the music we love sounds inevitable: “It’s playing the thing that we all know is unfolding whether we want to accept it or not. And it’s there always. We just need to harness it. Be open to it.” His words struck me as self-aggrandizing hot air at first. But then, at the Steinway, we witness them in action.
Think of Batiste’s life as music. He’s spinning from rehearsals to the Grammys to his wife Suleika Jaouad’s hospital bedside as she fights a recurring battle with leukemia. There are high notes, low notes and sections where both are in dramatic conflict. It’s all music for American Symphony to harness. The sequence at the Steinway, which is beautifully couched between sad, joyous and vulnerable moments Batiste shares with Jaouad, is among the few where the film rises to the occasion.
At other times, Matthew Heineman’s admiring and beautifully photographed doc can seem lost in a struggle between everything that’s going on in Batiste’s life and the remnants of what the film originally intended to be. American Symphony, which boasts Barack and Michelle Obama alongside Batiste as executive producers, was conceived as a straightforward music doc. Batiste meant to take his inclusive, genre-blending brand on the road, travelling across the US to collect diverse influences– from folk to Indigenous drumming – to be incorporated into his ambitious milestone moment at Carnegie Hall. But life got in the way.
In the fall of 2021, on the same morning that Batiste was nominated for 11 Grammy nominations, Jaouad, a best-selling author, found out the cancer she was diagnosed with a decade before, at 22, had returned. New waves of Covid were also en route, sidelining Batiste’s road plans to Zoom calls that would take place between an awards show schedule and hospital visits, as Jaouad prepares, emotionally and physically, for a bone marrow transplant. She would be at home, watching Batiste put on a showstopping performance of his hit song Freedom at the Grammys, not long before returning to the hospital for her cancer treatment.
American Symphony makes a valiant pivot but while it covers a lot of ground, it rarely digs deep. Batiste’s career, and his significance as a young Black artist who irritates gatekeepers by keeping a foot in the classical world, is accounted for in broad strokes. And though the film wisely anchors its narrative in his loving and resilient relationship with Jaouad, and what they’re going through, our understanding of who they are still feels superficial.
Batiste is a cheerful and inspiring presence but there’s a guardedness to him that keeps us at a respectful distance. His relentless optimism, so integral when he’s trying to keep everyone’s spirits up, can also function as a shield. Scenes when we’re at his bedside, curiously watching him struggle with sleep in the presence of cameras or on speakerphone discussing his anxiety with his therapist, come off like curated intimacy. Funny enough, it’s when Batiste is performing that he feels the most vulnerable, as if music is the safe space for him to let it all out.
During the climactic concert at Carnegie Hall, which sadly we only see portions from, Batiste’s plans are once again disrupted. A power outage knocks out his orchestra. All he can do is play the piano. After an awkward pause, he pivots, seizes the moment and lunges into a passionate solo that demands you be open to it.
American Symphony is out on 24 November in US cinemas and 29 November on Netflix everywhere
