What Happened, Miss Simone?

Description

Nina Simone was not your typical ‘60s diva. Although her music is often grouped with the greatest soul singers, in her early years, she really wanted nothing more than to be the first acknowledged female Black classical pianist. When popular music became a more plausible career path, she brought her unique skills to bear, including a richly textured voice and fierce piano playing. On stage, she held each song accountable as though it were a partner in her attempt to get to the bottom of things, often fiercely political. She was stunning and forceful and she paid the price in psychic damage and racial ire. Liz Garbus’s enthralling and deeply researched portrait, What Happened, Miss Simone?, tracks this tragic yet triumphant figure through many tumultuous decades, using a trove of recently unearthed documents—confessional tapes, dazzling performances, excerpts from her unvarnished diaries—and contemporary interviews with her daughter, friends, fellow musicians and cultural historians. From her emergence in the late 1950s as a nightclub singer, her meteoric ascension soon after, to her prominence within the Civil Rights Movement where she mingled with such figures as Betty Shabazz, Stokely Carmichael and Lorraine Hansberry, we sense the melancholic currents of an inspired artist who was once, in her own words, “Young, Gifted and Black.” —Steve Seid

Film Details