Word: pryor
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Directed by Richard Pryor...
...FIRST scene of Jo Jo Dancer, Richard Pryor, who is comedian Jo Jo Dancer, whom we know is in fact Richard Pryor, looks mortified. He stares in sheer horror at his multiple reflections in a three-way mirror. Perhaps, I thought, having just seen the credits roll across the screen, this is the megalomaniac horror of a man who produced, directed, co-wrote and starred in this self-indulgent movie...
...minute later, as Pryor writhes and creeps across the floor of a room that looks like a Texes saloon after a brawl, the horror becomes real. He crawls around searching, not for anything in particular, but just searching, in that desperate way that junkies do, and it's painful to watch. The drug-addicted superstar cliche that we've seen three times in A Star Is Born, once in Lady Sings The Blues, once in Pink Floyd's The Wall, and who knows-how-many-times elsewhere is as touching and awful in Jo Jo Dancer's opening scene...
...When Pryor emerges moments later with a bong and some presumably freebased cocaine, the audience knows only too well from the events of Pryor's own life what is about to happen. When we see him in the next scene being carried on a stretcher, looking like a bloody, beached alligator with an afro, we can fill in the blanks ourselves...
This could be, at first glance, a shocking, depressing and ultimately uplifting film. And to some degree it is. But Pryor proceeds to lose us the minute Jo Jo arrives at the hospital. Jo Jo's soul, in the form of a second and unclad Richard Pryor, emerges from his body and embarks on a journey through his past...