John Sayles’ sedate, inoffensive Honeydripper takes
place in Harmony, Alabama, in 1950, where Jim Crow laws are in full
swing and black men can be arrested simply for being in the wrong place
at the wrong time.
The Honeydripper of the title is a run-down, failing club owned by
Tyrone Purvis (Danny Glover), a menacing pianist with a heart of gold.
Tyrone is so broke he can’t afford to buy enough liquor to get through
the weekend, but on Saturday night, his luck is going to turn: For the
first night ever, famed electric guitar player
Guitar Sam is set
to take the stage at the Honeydripper. Things don’t quite go as
planned—but luckily, Harmony sits on a rail line, and a
guitar-playing drifter named Sonny (Gary Clark Jr.) is on hand to stage
a last-minute rescue.
For the most part, Honeydripper is pretty standard
stuff—an against-all-odds story of rock ‘n’ roll saving the
day—and it doesn’t help that Sayles shoots and writes the
fictional film as if it were a biopic, with all the musical sequences
and sepia-tinted edges the genre implies.
The film’s saving grace is its restrained depiction of the racist
South. When Sonny goes looking for work picking cotton, he’s arrested
for vagrancy—and ends up serving his sentence by picking cotton,
the work of the prisoners indistinguishable from the work done by free
black men. Similarly, the racism of Harmony’s sheriff is taken as a
given, and when he hankers for a fried chicken sandwich, he heads over
to the Honeydripper for the best in town. Sayles’ integration of racism
into the very fabric of the film—accepting it as a reality,
something that’s low-level and insidious but also incidental, in terms
of plot—seems like a realistic depiction of the way the Jim Crow
South actually worked, and is handled deftly enough to save
Honeydripper from mediocrity.