Movies: I Wanna Dance with Somebody

Kasi Lemmons’s Whitney Houston film’s a tribute and cautionary tale

Advertised as being written for the screen by the same man who wrote Bohemian Rhapsody—an enjoyable, flawed rock star movie which compartmentalized sex from its subject—I Wanna Dance with Somebody deserves an audience. This is probably thanks to its director, filmmaker Kasi Lemmons (Eve’s Bayou, Harriet, Black Nativity). The new Whitney Houston movie grips and holds one’s attention.

Made with approval from the Houston family, the film falters. Lemmons downplays Whitney Houston’s drug addiction, which is obscured until the end. Whitney’s mother, an ex-singer who by most accounts lorded over her daughter with constant pressure to conform and suppress her sexuality, is overromanticized. Giving Whitney’s sanctimonious mother a moral pass is a stain. Lemmons also recreates Whitney’s historic Super Bowl performance of the Star-Spangled Banner without providing the proper context that America was at war—the first president Bush’s war, which was a wrong war—a context which Whitney Houston prob…