Word: dancerly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This 1940s Capraesque move has been pulled once too often to work in 1986. And Pryor-as-Dancer-as-Pryor's flashbacks and comatose delusions are too self-justifying and self-serving for anyone to believe them...
...victim of circumstances and earn more than a modicum of our sympathy without going all the way with it. He uses the movie to avenge all the people that did him wrong along life's proverbial dusty road, but he hides behind the alter-ego of Jo Jo Dancer...
Richard Pryor is a real and talented person; Jo Jo Dancer is a Hollywood cliche. After this sort of rags-to-riches-and-show-biz-and-bitches movie has been done so many times before, the only thing that could make this a story worth repeating would be a gossipy, autobiographical format. As it is, the audience endures Richard Pryor's revenge without being able to cross the tenuous line between fiction and fact. This half-hearted approach earns only a half-hearted response...
...Prior sets us up to assume that this is his autobiography by creating a fragmented film that the audience can only piece together from the newspaper clips of a few years back. The first scene jumps from Dancer picking up his pipe and freebase right to Dancer looking like a mongrel in the hospital's intensive care unit. Unless we knew exactly what happened to Pryor, we'd have no way of knowing what has happened to Dancer. Freebasing was reputed to be a dangerously potent high prior to Pryor, but it was not a pyromaniac's delight until Pryor...
When we see Dancer dallying with his second wife Dawn (Barbara Williams), a radical and intellectual white beauty, we know the couple is a bi-racial conjugal stereotype, but it's clearly a stereotype with some factual basis. And the blow by blow (and blow and blow) of Pryor being lapped into the vortex of the Hollywood scene is painfully compelling. The scenes are nothing if not the typical cinematic version of sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll in the fast lane, but once again the stereotype earns credence from its factual basis...