Longtime indie filmmaker, John Sayles, is an artist whose heart and musical soul is in the right place. In Honeydripper his interest is focused on the evolution of 1950s music from blues to rhythm and blues (aka rock'n'roll).
In 1950s Alabama the beleaguered Tyrone Purvis (Danny Glover) is deeply in debt and about to lose his roadhouse, The Honeydripper, when he gets a brainstorm: he'll book regional celebrity Guitar Sam to play the club, have the best Saturday night of his life and use the proceeds to pay off the landlord and the chicken man and to get his nightclub out of hock. There is a problem. Purvis doesn't have any money to book Guitar Sam, isn't sure where to find him and doesn't know if he'd show up anyway.
Everything is set up to build to a suspenseful Saturday night at the Honeydripper. There is a well-cut cast of Southern characters who include Tyrone's queenly house singer Bertha Mae (Dr. Mable John) and her consort Slick (Vondie Curtis Hall); the corpulent white sheriff (Stacey Keach); Purvis' beautiful stepdaughter China Doll (Yaya DaCosta); and his wife Delilah (Lisa Gay Hamilton). Into this mix comes the wandering Sonny Blake (rising guitar phenomenon Gary Clark Jr.), an itinerant bluesman cut from the Robert Johnson legend, claiming to be as good a player as Guitar Sam.
This is one Saturday night when everything could go right, or everything could go wrong.
The Honeydripper, set at the intersection of the civil rights movement and the emergence of rhythm and blues in America, is rich with characters and flowing with music.
"...a ground-level human comedy..." suntimes.com
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