Purple Rain
A young musician struggles to maintain his personal and familial relationships while fronting his fledgling house band.
These movies are hard to review because it sits in the middle of a lot of genres and artistic intentions. Purple Rain is not a musical since it’s really about a musician’s life and the musicians’ art itself is featured very prominently. Musicals are very specifically about music being incorporated non-diegetically, almost as a form of dialogue; musicals are usually not about music itself, unless you’re talking High School Musical. This movie is also not a factual documentary (The Decline of Western Civilization) or mockumentary (This Is Spinal Tap), though the type of movie Purple Rain is could serve as an autobiography.
Purple Rain‘s genre is close to a movie like Rock Star, Crossroads (the Ralph Macchio one), or Prey for Rock & Roll, though Rain stars more than one person famous for real-world music, where the others is closely based on real events. Probably the closest movie, genre-wise, would be 8 Mile: it stars an actual famous artist playing a semi-autobiographical character with very intentionally diegetic music that’s not just stuck on the soundtrack. Producing this kind of movie is very rare by nature because you need the heft of musical fame to really draw an audience. A studio isn’t gonna look at a script involving music and musicians that no one cares about en masse and think it’s a worthwhile investment.
Some awkward editing, placing characters into scenes too in media res. The Kid, Prince’s character, went from hovering, silent and mysterious, around Apollonia during the introduction scene when she was trying to ply her trade in the club, to hanging out with her in a clothing store and outright asking if he could just take her bracelet thing. It works, in a way, because the audience already knew Prince was a weirdo and could get away with doing weirdo things as a rake.
Speaking of character types…Morris, the antagonist, was also rather rakish, but I’m thinking their occupation selects for that personality type, especially back then. Their individual interactions with straight characters made for a lot of comedy, perhaps unintentionally. Morris commanding his sidekick to toss that one annoying woman in the dumpster (lol), and The Kid creating a fake initiation rule for Apollonia and her falling for it, inaccurately (also lol). There were some unfunny moments, like disproportionate woman-beating*, which is on the jerk side of the rakish trope. At the time of the movie, 1984, that was a lot more acceptable to see in movies, but fear not: current-year critics have explained to us that we need to think of it as especially problematic now.
Purple Rain wasn’t a bad watch, other than the prurient scenes, but Prince’s star power really carried it through. House bands aren’t common anymore and I don’t think they were much more so back then, so seeing behind–the-scenes of how that industry works, even if dramatized, has some value. I don’t have evidence for this, but I think it did so well at the box office because you got to see Prince in long-form content in a pre-social media age. Folks weren’t saturated with new “footage” of celebrities all the time, so a feature-length film starring their guy would have been eaten up, no matter how bad the actual movie was.
* I know. You’re thinking “there’s never a reason to beat a woman,” but I’m talking really disproportionate. The Kid backhanded Apollonia when she revealed she teamed up with Morris. Allying herself with his enemy would be pretty insulting, but for most people it’s not really ethical grounds for getting physical. The Kid’s dad doing some wife-beating isn’t so much disproportionate because it’s expected. He shouldn’t be doing that, okay? But it’s not a surprise, is what I’m getting at, when the dude’s a depressed alcoholic.