Jimi Hendrix purists itching to hear “Purple Haze” and “The Wind Cries Mary” in “Jimi: All Is by My Side” should be warned: Neither of those chestnuts appears in this movie. Far from a comprehensive biopic or conventional star-is-born parable, this oblique, impressionistic, thoroughly convincing slice of Hendrix’s life instead zooms in on perhaps the most pivotal time of his career, when he spent a year in London becoming the guitar god and rock icon he would die as just a few years later.
Andre Benjamin — better known as Andre 3000, one half of the hip-hop group OutKast — does a phenomenal job of channeling Hendrix, first as a vague, unformed creature, and finally as the shrewd, self-conscious but still idealistic creation he virtually willed into being.
Like all superstars, this one had more than one author: “Jimi,” which has been astutely written and directed by John Ridley, pays homage not only to its preternaturally gifted subject but to Linda Keith (Imogen Poots), the fashion model who in 1966 was best known for being Keith Richards’ girlfriend. She harbored enough taste to identify Hendrix as a musical genius, and enough drive to convince a dreamy, infuriatingly passive-aggressive savant to take responsibility for his own potentially meteoric future.
It’s not a very well-known chapter in Hendrix’s life, and Ridley, who won an Oscar for his “12 Years a Slave” screenplay, revisits it with vivid, atmospheric texture, from the Greenwich Village clubs where Hendrix appeared as Jimmy James — backing up Curtis Knight, then fronting his own band — to Carnaby Street-era London, where he eagerly fused his love for the blues with psychedelia, sci-fi and straight-up rock ‘n’ roll. (He’s just as drawn to Dylan as he is to Howlin’ Wolf, seeing allegiance to one style of music as a “cage.”)
Stutter-stepping through a time that bridged post-war wholesomeness with the trippy grooviness of the ’60s, Ridley doesn’t tell Hendrix’s story as much as parachute in for brief, vagrant moments, interspersing them with quick flashbacks in the form of real-life snapshots or vintage film footage of Seattle, where Hendrix grew up. As audacious as his titular subject, Ridley often drops “Jimi” into total silence, as if to prepare viewers for the explosive changes that are just on the horizon, but as yet invisible.
“Jimi” takes place between 1966 and 1967, when Paul McCartney suggested Hendrix help represent Britain at the Monterey Pop Festival — which in turn introduced America to the Jimi Hendrix most of us remember: the literally incendiary player and iconoclast who had a penchant for playing with his teeth and behind his back, and ended his set by lighting his guitar on fire.
A few of those flourishes are on display in “Jimi,” but for the most part the film is a study in Hendrix’s fey, approach-avoidance relationship to celebrity (when he takes acid for the first time, and against Keith’s advice, he looks in the mirror and sees Marilyn Monroe), and his tumultuous relationships with women, including his girlfriend, Kathy Etchingham (Hayley Atwell).
Hendrix is so gentle, soft-spoken and poetically inclined toward love and universal good vibes that when he viciously attacks Etchingham with a telephone at a London nightclub, it comes as a sickening, disillusioning shock. Guitar playing has always had obvious phallic associations with sexual potency; here, Ridley sees the trope through the lens of women, as competitors for the scene’s newest stud, and victims of the sexism-saturated rock world.
Far more cheering are the sequences when Hendrix meets his idols and blows them away with his prodigious playing. Ridley has done an outstanding job of casting look-alike actors to play such historic pop culture figures as managers Andrew Loog Oldham and Chas Chandler, as well as the great Eric Clapton himself, who, after inviting Hendrix to jam one night, is literally chased off the stage by the American’s scorching version of “Killing Floor.” Having uncannily mastered Hendrix’s left-handed playing, as well as his drawn-out speaking style, performance tics and lanky, cat-like posture, Benjamin utterly owns that moment, just as he dominates “Jimi” with a portrayal that’s at once tantalizingly off-center and on-the-nose in the very best sense. (It should be noted that Benjamin is given an able sonic assist from longtime Los Angeles session cat Waddy Wachtel on guitar.)
Because Hendrix’s estate refused to license any of the musician’s original songs for the film, Ridley was left with the early covers Hendrix performed, including “Wild Thing” and a performance of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” at a famous performance for the Beatles themselves at the Savile Theatre. The scene is nothing short of electrifying, shot through with the exhilaration of discovery and suggesting that Ridley succeeded in turning “Jimi’s” greatest limitation into its greatest strength.
Liberated from playing the hits, Benjamin eloquently captures Hendrix’s emerging style without having to succumb to jukebox-musical opportunism. Rather, he allows glimmers of the future star’s voice and style to wrap, tendril-like, around everything he does. You can hear “Purple Haze” and “The Wind Cries Mary” all the way through “Jimi,” right where they always were: between the notes.