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Honeydripper
Generally favorable reviews
Based on 27 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 7 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Drama
Written by: John Sayles
Directed by: John Sayles
Release Date:
Theatrical: December 28, 2007
DVD: June 24, 2008
Running Time: 123 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: PG-13 for brief violence and some suggestive material
Starring Danny Glover, Charles S. Dutton, Lisa Gay Hamilton, Stacy Keach, Mary Steenburgen, Yaya DaCosta, Sean Patrick Thomas, and Gary Clark Jr.
It's 1950, and it's a make-or-break weekend for Tyrone Purvis (Danny Glover), the proprietor of the Honeydripper Lounge. Deep in debt, Tyrone is desperate to bring back the crowds that used to come to his place. He decides to lay off his longtime blues singer Bertha Mae and announces that he has hired a famous guitar player, Guitar Sam, for a one-night-only gig in order to save the club. Into town drifts Sonny Blake, a young man with nothing to his name but big dreams and the guitar case in his hand. Rejected by Tyrone when he applies to play at the Honeydripper, he is intercepted by the corrupt local sheriff, arrested for vagrancy, and rented out as an unpaid cotton picker to the highest bidder. But when Tyrone's ace-in-the-hole fails to materialize at the train station, his desperation leads him back to Sonny and the strange, wire-dangling object in his guitar case. The Honeydripper Lounge is all set to play its part in rock and roll history. (Emerging Pictures)
Also On Metacritic
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Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
LA Weekly Ernest Hardy
Honeydripper is classic Sayles cinema: an insightful sketch of assorted common folk whose criss-crossing dreams and agendas unfold against larger, more powerful (and sometimes crushing) sociopolitical and cultural forces.
Read Full Review >Variety John Anderson
The result is one of Sayles' best films. The music, a mix of blues, seminal rock and newcomer Gary Clark Jr.'s performance, will be an obvious draw, as will the performances by some leading African-American actors.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
Danny Glover, as hard-rock reliable as Spencer Tracy in his prime, plays onetime pianist Tyrone "Pine Top" Purvis.
Read Full Review >Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir
Honeydripper offers a leisurely, atmospheric production with lots of time to appreciate his largely African-American cast, along with rocking musical interludes and just the faintest wash of spirituality.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Kevin Crust
Music may be Honeydripper's most indelible element and Sayles and longtime collaborator, composer Mason Daring, seamlessly incorporate several original songs alongside the soundtrack's period tunes.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Maitland McDonagh
It's about ordinary people living in the shadow of nagging, day-to-day racism, and about the music that reminds them of what's right with the world rather than what's wrong.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips
Typical of a pretty good Sayles movie. There are few, if any, heroes and villains.
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
With Honeydripper, Sayles has done what he always does: bring together a group of characters and allow us to relish their interaction. His affection for the characters is both obvious and infectious. We like them, warts and all.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey
In its first half, Honeydripper trickles. In its second, it really flows.
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Connie Ogle
''Everything got a rhythm, even pulling cotton off the plant,'' a field hand offers helpfully. Like his eager young bluesman when he finally hits the stage, Sayles hits exactly the right notes.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer Bill White
John Sayles ventures into August Wilson territory with Honeydripper.
Read Full Review >The New Yorker David Denby
At its best when the characters sit around, dither, and ruminate. Moviemaking seems to have become almost magically easy for this independent writer-director. He builds a detailed atmosphere, brings his good people and his bad together, and lets them jabber at one another; the virtuosity is rhetorical rather than visual.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt
His heart -- and musical soul -- is in the right place, but the film makes you at times uncomfortable with black and Southern stereotypes that may hinder some from fully enjoying an otherwise benign and cheerful tall tale of the Saturday night when rock came to rural Alabama.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias
There are precisely zero surprises in how things play out--the main thread is basically "Big Night" revisited--but the film gets better as it goes along, and it closes with a rousing musical flourish, as immensely charismatic newcomer Clark Jr. finally hits the stage. At last, Sayles' sleepy drama wakes with a start.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer
There is a great movie to be made about the first stirrings of rock 'n' roll. Honeydripper is not that film, but it certainly whets your appetite for it.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Josh Rosenblatt
Honeydripper’s story isn’t anything you haven’t seen a dozen times before, but where Sayles succeeds (where Sayles always succeeds) is in his ability to dramatize the psychological and linguistic details that give identity to a subculture struggling for survival.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen
A contemplative fable, Honeydripper locates the moment but misses the heart-pounding, gut-wrenching explosion -- the history is there, the thrill isn't.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Ty Burr
Has John Sayles finally lost his mojo? How anyone could take a subject like the moment the Delta blues went electric and suck the joy and fury out of it is anybody's guess, but the talky, dull "Honeydripper" represents playwriting rather than filmmaking. And didactic playwriting at that.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Jack Mathews
Like previous films by the literary-minded auteur John Sayles, Honeydripper takes forever to develop its characters, its period and its location. But once it's done all that, the payoffs are rich.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Stephen Holden
Honeydripper is agreeable, well-intentioned and very, very slow. Sadly, it illustrates the difference between an archetype and a stereotype. When the first falls flat, it turns into the other and becomes a cliché.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum
True to his stolid, humanist instincts and characteristically stodgy directorial style, writer-director John Sayles creates a story more educational than engrossing.
Read Full Review >New York Post Kyle Smith
The movie is well-acted, but it's as talky as if it were written for the stage, with fatally slow pacing. Strictly for hard-core Sayles fans and maybe for lovers of American roots music.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Ann Hornaday
Trudging nobly under a mantle of impeccably earnest intentions and a fussy, too-quaint-by-half production design, Honeydripper lags and drags to its utterly predictable end. There's not a spark of spontaneity or soul about it.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 7.0 (out of 10) based on 7 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Lucky J gave it a10:
Any John Sayles film is worth a look. Consider "Alien vs. Predator: Requiem" before you start handing out zeros in such a cavalier fashion. (cancelling your stat-skewing, tw, ftw)
Jay H. gave it a5:
Lackluster period detail and a very slow moving story hinder this from working well. The acting is quite good at least, but is a bit melodramatic. Rather talky which makes at at times tedious.
Chad S. gave it a9:
After lukewarm responses for both "Casa de los Babys" and "Silver City", the godfather of the American independent film movement steps down from his soapbox, for the interim, and goes back in time, to immerse the moviegoer inside the phantasmagorical world of the imagined south, made hyper-real by such "regional" writers as William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. Tyrone Purvis(Danny Glover) owns a two-bit juke-joint, a house of spiritual uplift in its own right, but nevertheless, a watering hole is still just a watering hole, and not a church, by his god-fearing wife's standards. All black music can be traced back to the church, however; all black music was once touched by god. The juke-joint is like The Church of Christ Without Christ. "Guitar Sam"(Gary Clark Jr.) is the man with "wise blood". He knows that the electric guitar is the new jesus of cool. Tyrone might not be a preacher, and his juke-joint might not be a church, but both man and institution are sanctified by music and share an aversion to blood. Flavor Flav(of Public Enemy) once barked, "Honeydripper/sucker sipper/big dipper/sucker dipper," back when the reality TV star was "on a hype tip", incidentally, around the same time that this director made his last period piece film. The one about the coal miners. Once again, we're "Cold Lampin' with Say-le Sayles", twenty years later, with arguably his best film since 1987's "Matewan"(certainly, this is his most accesible outing since 1996's "Lone Star"). When Delilah(Lisa Gay Hamilton) chooses her husband over her church, we realize that she's Lily Sabbath all grown up. It's not the first time she has left a blind preacher for a blind sinner, her husband, the one with a murder rap like Hazel Motes. "Honeydripper", aside from the film's racial component, is about the synchronicity between spiritual and secular music. But there's racial tension, too. It's unavoidable. As racist sheriffs go, though, this sheriff(Stacy Keach) isn't Sheriff Charlie Wade-bad(from "Lone Star", the sheriff played by Kris Kristofferson). "Honeydripper" avoids the usual trappings of other historical films that deal with institutionalized racism(the only burning in this film is a guitar burning), in favor of showing the prevailing caste system between northern and southern "Negroes". "Lone Star" was about race. "Honeydripper" is more about music. And in that respect, "Honeydripper" is his least political movie, albeit politics are rife on the screen, since 1994's "The Secret of Roan Inish". His leftist politics doesn't smother the narrative in pedagogy, this time. Nobody gets lynched.
Terry B. gave it a10:
Talk about "vibe"!!! Great !!!
Lisa N. gave it a7:
In John Sayles' latest film, Danny Glover plays a struggling nightclub owner in 1950's Alabama. Surrounded by obstacles, he puts everything behind one last attempt to save his club and books a Saturday night performance by a famed guitar player. The story, partially inspired by Sayles' short story, "Keeping Time," is full of a community of complex fully-realized characters. And although the plot moves along slowly, you can not help but feel drawn into their plights. While this film is not nearly as wonderful as some of Sayles' finest work (such as "Lone Star" or "Passionfish"), this film is a definitely a worthwhile watch.
Tomasz W. gave it a0:
Honeydripper is an embarrassing failure on many fronts mercilessly exposing Sayles's deficiencies as a director and a total lack of talent as a writer. It's sluggish and painfully predictable in plot development, handicapped by wooden acting (best represented by a zombie performance of Danny Glover) and stagey sets, and poisoned with grating racial and cultural stereotypes. The story has unbreachable holes, characters lack reasonable motivations, and the whole film looks like a an expensive high school show.
