Memphis, the new film from director Tim Sutton (Pavilion, 2012), opens in a television studio. A talk show is in session, the crew sweating in the shadows, and from the background emerges the musician Willis Earl Beal, playing himself. “In your wildest dreams,” the host asks, “did you ever think you’d have an album out and be in a motion picture?”
“Yeah, I did,” Beal responds, half jokingly. “In very many ways I created this. Life is artifice, man. It’s all artifice.”
Artifice and authenticity are both deep in the soil of Memphis, a city built around performance, its mythology tightly bound to the music that was created there. Its sonic history can be traced back to three distinct styles. The first is the blues, brought to the city by W.C. Handy in the form of “Memphis Blues,” reportedly the first song to feature “blue notes.” The second is country and rock ’n’ roll, popularized by Sun Records head honcho Sam Phillips and his roster of misfit artists, including Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley. The third, and most important to the film, is soul, distinct from the sounds emanating from Detroit and popularized by the driving backbeat and harsh brass playing coming out of Stax/Volt and Hi Records. Cautiously, I’m relegating Memphis rap, a still-vibrant scene filled with mystery and a deep appreciation for the roots of the city’s musical heritage, to a footnote here because the genre doesn’t play a part in the film (even though it could have, and maybe should have). But for the sake of Memphis, it’s useful to see all this music as part of a lineage, with a shared archetypal character manifesting throughout the songs: the wanderer, the charlatan, the midnight rambler.
Memphis is about this mythology more than anything else. The film’s narrative, or what exists of one, could easily have been lifted from an old soul song: A musician, battling personal and creative dilemmas, moves from the bar to the recording studio to the church, looking for answers. He sleeps on couches, rope-a-dopes with his demons on Beale Street, and seeks guidance in the wise words of a cigarette- smoking street corner hustler. But even though Beal claims to harbor secret powers—interchangeably referring to himself as a wizard and a sorcerer—there seems to be nothing stopping his life from vaporizing under the Tennessee sun.
This journey through the mythological landscape is also a showcase for the genuine weirdness of Memphis’s lead performer. Beal, a real-life musician whose lo-fi recordings bridge modern soul with a simple and unadorned form of the blues, is a modern trickster who seems to take delight in conflating the fact and fantasy of his public persona. In the film, both are present. Fitted with a retro porkpie hat, leather jacket, and exaggerated limp, he ambles toward darkness, an apparition fusing the past and present.
Structurally, the film mirrors this ghostlike ambience, moving along at the slurred pace of a Southern drawl and smearing the traditional modes of fiction and nonfiction. The result is what film critic Robert Koehler calls a “cinema of in-between-ness,” a style that derives from the tension between a documentary impulse—Sutton utilizes a cast of non-actors, including Beal—and a rigid formalism. These two poles of the filmic spectrum are seemingly at odds, but when handled with care, they create a space that neither could achieve on its own.
One benefit of this approach is the sense of place the film creates. Memphis isn’t simply a character in the story; every inch of its cultural and sociopolitical history is captured on camera, which Sutton lets linger on the dusty roads and abandoned storefronts. The neighborhoods Beal traipses through are hollowed out, the life that once existed there still hanging in the dust of the late-day air. The main character’s disintegration is also that of the city, a largely African-American metropolis rich in cultural history but slowly collapsing under the weight of financial turmoil. The sadness, and ultimately hope, that permeates the film is not just for the protagonist to make it out of the darkness that surrounds him, but for the city itself to move past its death toward an afterlife.
Which makes Memphis a celebration and an elegy for a city on the brink of erasure. But what the film wants to tell us, using Beal as a vessel, is that, even as the real-life structures supporting the city are in the process of crumbling—in truth, the fatal damage may already be done—the dream life, lived through the songs that float on the air, will never die. It will keep reinventing itself, keep being reborn, the steady backbeat a pulse that never slows down or fades away.
A version of this article appears in the September 2014 issue of Modern Painters magazine.
