The most anticipated music movie of the SXSW festival has got to be Jimi: All Is By My Side, the unconventional Jimi Hendrix bio starring Andre Benjamin that was written and directed by 12 Years a Slave Oscar-winning screenwriter John Ridley.
The movie, which had its American premiere in Austin on Wednesday, avoids the cliches of the music biopic genre. Rather than the conventional arc of the rise and subsequent substance abuse assisted death of a doomed genius, Jimi, which is Ridley's directorial debut, focuses on the year that Hendrix spent in England before taking America by storm at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967.
Nearly as important to the story as Hendrix himself is Linda Keith, the Vogue model who was Keith Richards' girlfriend before she met Hendrix. Played by Imogen Poots, she has a key role in urging the outrageously talented but unfocused guitarist to get his act together. It's a quiet, captivating, sharply edited movie, full of intuitive performances.
On Sunday, a week after he won the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for his script about the life of Solomon Northup, Ridley was in Austin to talk up Jimi.
Ridley's inspiration for telling the story came from stumbling upon a Hendrix rarity on YouTube called Send My Love To Linda, which the guitarist wrote for Keith.
"It was one of the most powerful and emotive pieces I'd ever heard in my life," he says.
"Why is he writing this song? I wondered. Who is Linda?"
Of Benjamin, who's startling good as Hendrix, Ridley says, "I just cannot imagine anyone else in this role."
