Jimi

The original title of Jimi — All Is By My Side — is an ungrammatical summary of the film’s approach to Jimi Hendrix. It details the number of people — almost all white — who helped Hendrix start his singing and his career.

Chief among them is Linda Keith, who at the time was Keith Richards' girlfriend. Talk about narcissism: Keith was drawn to a woman named Keith before Mick married his lookalike Bianca. Linda inspires Jimi to quit the Curtis Mayfield band, to play his own kind of music, to sing. She lands him gigs and finds him a (white) manager. She buys him his first guitar (which is as white as his helpers) which becomes a symbol of their off-again on-again relationship. His second white agent gives him his and his group's name and buys his freedom from his earlier US contracts. Candidly, this story about a black hero is about the white helpers who made him. The film details two kinds of power systems, race and gender. As the black genius depends on white help in the white system, the swaggering macho man depends on the women he inevitably abuses.  

The film omits the climax to which it apparently builds: Jimi’s magnificent Star Spangled Banner at Monterey. The film periodically advances an early Hendrix British TV interview, in which he finally declares his right to radically transform other songs, as we see him do with the title track of Sgt. Pepper. But the film stops on the verge of his career-making performance. That is, this is not the full story of the great guitarist but the story of his beginning, his origin. It assumes we know what Monterey did for him.

Lest we forget, the film also outlines his social context: Carnaby Street, the swinging sex life, the groupie culture, the division over Vietnam, the emergence of grass and acid, British and American forms of racism and the roots of Black Power. Hendrix’s three women here successively stir him to speak, to think, to take a position. Though he resists Michael X’s radicalizing attempt Hendrix at the end shows himself much matured and strengthened from the amorphous mute Linda Keith discovered. The open ending -- will she join him at Monterey or retain her dependence from the force she created -- keeps us focused on their power struggle, unresolved.