James Brown biopic ‘Get On Up’ is one of the year’s best

Supercharged by Chadwick Boseman's tour de force as the iconic Godfather of Soul James Brown — and pitch-perfect music supervision by producer and longtime devotee Mick Jagger — "Get On Up'' is one funk-tastic musical biopic.

Vigorously directed by Tate Taylor ("The Help''), the film largely avoids standard rise-and-fall clichés and strained attempts to explain a messy and colorful life filled with contradictions that doesn't easily fit inside a 2 ¹/₂ hour narrative with a PG-13 rating.

Instead, the screenplay by British brothers Jez and John-Henry Butterworth ("Edge of Tomorrow'') jumps back and forth between significant incidents — opening in 1988 with a high-on-PCP, middle-aged Brown using a rifle to terrorize a roomful of insurance agents, one of whom accidentally used Brown's private bathroom in the same building.

That's immediately followed by a flashback to 20 years earlier — one of the film's rare missteps — of Brown flying into Vietnam under heavy enemy fire to entertain American troops. That's fortunately followed by the first of several sequences depicting Brown's troubled childhood in Georgia, where he was abandoned by his parents and sent to live in a brothel operated by an aunt (Octavia Spencer).

Jailed for theft for three years — Boseman plays Brown from ages 17 through 63 — he was paroled to the family of singer Bobby Byrd (the excellent Nelsan Ellis), who becomes Brown's long-suffering best friend and musical collaborator until he finally walks out following Brown' s famous 1971 concert in Paris.

Dan Aykroyd and Chadwick Boseman star in "Get On Up."Photo: AP/Universal Pictures

Along the way, Taylor and his writers point up the contradictions: Brown was both a black nationalist and an integrationist who embraced President Lyndon Johnson; a devoted family man and wife-beater; a man who constantly reinvented himself but wasn't averse to self-parody; and a pioneering entrepreneur who ended up in hot water with the IRS (and ultimately back in jail for that 1988 incident, which we see climax with a high-speed police chase).

All of that is less important, though, than the music and the loving way it's staged, including Brown's 1962 shows at the Apollo Theater, where he recorded his groundbreaking "Live At the Apollo" album; an all-star variety show at which he upstaged the Rolling Stones; and even Brown's guest appearance amid a lily-white crowd in the film "Ski Party'' — which the film shifts into slow motion to suggest Brown's awareness that he may be trying too hard for a crossover audience.

The film's high point is a remarkable re-creation of Brown's 1968 Boston concert, hours after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, where the dynamic performer single-handedly defuses a potential riot. The film also takes pains to point out Brown's enormous contributions to developing funk and pointing the way toward rap.

"Get On Up'' avoids sentimentality, even when an uncomfortable Brown is visited backstage by his elderly mother (Viola Davis). Dan Aykroyd, who appeared in two movies with the real-life Brown, portrays his manager.

But the film belongs, heart and soul, to Boseman, who expertly lip-syncs to Brown's original tracks after playing a very different kind of black superstar in last year's Jackie Robinson bio-pic "42.'' This time, I think, he's going to get an Oscar nomination.

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