Whitney Houston biopic: Musical highs outweigh personal lows

By Mikael WoodPop Music Critic

Dec. 22, 2022 12:21 PM PT

The new Whitney Houston biopic climaxes with a detailed reenactment of the pop superstar’s show-stopping performance at the 1994 American Music Awards.

Stretched across 10 minutes, Houston’s act that night combined three songs from three distinct eras — “I Loves You, Porgy,” from George and Ira Gershwin’s 1935 opera “Porgy and Bess”; “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going,” from the early-’80s Broadway musical “Dreamgirls”; and “I Have Nothing,” from the singer’s then-recent “The Bodyguard” — into a knockout medley that displayed not only her vocal power but also her intelligence as a storyteller.

“To me, it’s the greatest television performance of all time,” says Clive Davis, the 90-year-old Arista Records founder who signed Houston to his label when she was 19 and went on to shepherd her career until her shocking death at age 48 in 2012. “The emotion, the bravura singing, the ability to strike every moment for the camera — there’s nobody else that could’ve done that.”

In the narrative arc of the movie, called “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” after Houston’s ebullient 1987 hit, the AMAs sequence — meant to leave audiences with a final reminder that despite her flaws and setbacks the singer was a transformative artist — serves almost exactly the same dramatic purpose as the detailed reenactment of Queen’s historic performance at 1985’s Live Aid in “Bohemian Rhapsody.” That’s no surprise given that the two films share a screenwriter in Anthony McCarten, whose crowd-pleasing script helped drive that 2018 Freddie Mercury biopic to a record-setting $900 million in global ticket sales.

Yet unlike “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which enlisted a frontman from a Queen tribute band to recreate Mercury’s singing, “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” — opening in theaters Friday with Naomi Ackie as Houston and Stanley Tucci as Davis — relies on the real thing: Houston’s original vocals from 22 of her songs, including the title track, “Greatest Love of All,” “How Will I Know,” “I Will Always Love You,” “It’s Not Right But It’s Okay” and her suite from the AMAs, all of which Ackie lip-syncs with impressive precision.

“There was never really a question of using a voice other than Whitney’s,” says Davis, a producer on the film along with Houston’s sister-in-law, Pat Houston, who oversees the singer’s estate. “I never attended a meeting where anything else was even speculated.” Adds Rodney Jerkins, the seasoned R&B hitmaker who co-wrote and produced “It’s Not Right But It’s Okay” in 1998 and acted as the movie’s executive music producer: “Using Whitney’s vocals was the only way I was gonna work on the project.”

An actress recreates the moment when Whitney Houston sings the National Anthem at the Super Bowl.

You can understand that position: A marvel of clarity and finesse, Whitney Houston’s instrument was one of a kind — by turns soaring, confiding and aggrieved, with a tone that could conjure both heartbreak and the euphoria of new love and could bring the verities of the church to even the bounciest dance track. Between 1985 and 1988, that voice earned Houston an unequaled string of seven consecutive No. 1 singles on Billboard’s Hot 100; “I Will Always Love You,” her smash interpretation of Dolly Parton’s stately ballad from “The Bodyguard,” is widely thought to be the bestselling single of all time by a female artist.

Yet success didn’t insulate Houston from harsh truths: In her AMAs medley, says her longtime music director, Rickey Minor, Houston “told a story about Black women and their struggles — about connecting to the pain of loss.” Finding an actress to entrust with channeling the complexity of Houston’s musical gift seemed all but impossible, according to Jerkins, not least because Houston wasn’t alive to pass along any know-how. “Her authentic voice is what allows fans to relive some of the most incredible performances in history,” Jerkins says.

It’s also what signals the movie’s role in a broader effort to reframe Houston’s legacy — and, as with recent biopics about Elvis Presley and Aretha Franklin, to extend the value of the singer’s intellectual property, which Billboard says has quadrupled to approximately $60 million since her estate entered into a partnership in 2019 with the publishing and marketing firm Primary Wave.

Directed by Kasi Lemmons, who made 2019’s “Harriet” about abolitionist Harriet Tubman, “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” follows author Gerrick Kennedy’s “Didn’t We Almost Have It All: In Defense of Whitney Houston” and a book and podcast by veteran music journalist Danyel Smith — “Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop” and “Black Girl Songbook” — in centering Houston’s art rather than the well-documented tumult of her private life: her rocky marriage to singer Bobby Brown, an allegation that she’d been sexually abused as a child, the substance abuse that eventually led to her accidental drowning in a bathtub at the Beverly Hilton just one day before the 54th Grammy Awards.

The movie doesn’t skip over the lurid episodes that made Houston a constant tabloid presence before she died (and for much of the decade since), though Lemmons and McCarten handle them pretty lightly — certainly more lightly than in a pair of recent tell-all-ish documentaries that inspired Davis to get this film rolling. It’s easy to attribute that treatment to the involvement of Houston’s estate, which has also authorized an aggressively cheerful Whitney Houston hologram show that launched in 2020. But “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” is so long on exacting set pieces — in addition to the AMAs, the movie restages Houston’s 1983 performance of “Home” on “The Merv Griffin Show,” her epic national anthem at Super Bowl XXV in 1991 and her rendition of “I Will Always Love You” at a 1994 concert in South Africa honoring Nelson Mandela — that you’re inclined to take Davis at his word when he says he went into the film determined to “reveal Whitney’s creative process and show her genius.”

Just as significant, the movie acknowledges Houston’s long-gossiped-about romantic relationship with Robyn Crawford, her friend and creative director, whose own 2019 memoir is another part of the current reclamation project. You’d hardly say the film presents Houston as a queer icon — but in the year of Beyoncé’s “Renaissance,” its embrace of that aspect of Houston’s identity says something about the culture’s evolving attitude toward Black women.

“Shine Bright” author Smith hopes that “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” marks “the beginning of her genius being made more clear” after years of accumulated neglect.

“It’s work to be optimistic about Whitney’s legacy in the face of so much history about Black women that goes under-celebrated,” she says. “But the thing is, I am optimistic, and I am willing to put in the work.” Smith was “raised on Elvis and Motown, and I recall that Elvis went out a really hard way. But that’s not the first thing we always think about when we think about Elvis. Let’s allow Whitney that same grace.”

A young woman looks over a picket fence.

“I Wanna Dance With Somebody” traces Houston’s talent back to her mother, the gospel and pop singer Cissy Houston, who trained Whitney and her older brother Gary to perform in church in their native New Jersey. “I used to listen to Whitney sing in the basement of our home in East Orange,” Gary Houston tells The Times. “She’d have my mother’s wig on and my mother’s high heels and her robe, and she’d find her way downstairs somehow without tripping. I’d be sitting at the side of the staircase and she’d sing some of my mother’s things, just mimicking what she heard. She’d be down there for hours.”

Narada Michael Walden, who co-wrote and produced “How Will I Know” and worked closely with Houston on her 1987 sophomore LP, says Cissy Houston brought Whitney along as a child to Cissy’s recording sessions as a backup vocalist for the likes of Franklin and Presley. “Even my first solo album, Cissy did backgrounds, and there’s this 11-year-old girl sitting in the corner,” he says. “That was little Whitney. So she was exposed to all these things and soaked it all up, and then she assimilated that old-school knowledge into a new way of doing it on steroids.

“When I met her on ‘How Will I Know,’ it was like meeting Muhammad Ali,” he says. “Nineteen years old, came in looking like 5 million bucks, just on fire. Then she went to the microphone and blew it down.” Laughing, Walden remembers listening to what she’d recorded. “We’re in the control room and she’s staring me down, like a fighter’s stare — like, ‘Are you checking out how good that sounds?’”

Narada Michael Walden, Aretha Franklin and Whitney Houston

For all her obvious skill, Houston’s presentation as a solo act made for an unlikely pitch in the early ’80s, “when it was all about groups [in R&B] — Earth, Wind & Fire, Shalamar, Rose Royce,” says Minor. “People in the industry were like, ‘What’s she gonna do? Just stand there and sing?’”

That was evidently enough for Davis. In the movie we see Houston audition for the executive at a small Manhattan nightclub with a glorious performance of “Greatest Love of All” that leads Davis to turn to an associate and declare, “I might’ve just heard the greatest voice of her generation.” Was his reaction as decisive as it’s depicted? “Without question,” Davis says.

Houston’s self-titled 1985 debut blended plush adult-contemporary ballads and uptempo pop tunes; two years later, “Whitney” added a throbbing, harder-edged rock sound to the mix with “So Emotional,” which Walden remembers cutting at New York’s Right Track studio. “Mick Jagger was next door, and he had to come in and hear it,” the producer says. “He was jumping around with her on the playback. Her voice was scalding.”

Bobby Brown, from left, Whitney Houston and Clive Davis in 1998.

Yet by 1989 some fans had begun accusing Houston of abandoning her roots in Black music. That year she was famously booed at the Soul Train Music Awards, an event dramatized in the new biopic. “I was there that night, and it was a real shock to her,” says Kenny “Babyface” Edmonds, the influential R&B singer and producer. “She definitely felt like she was being called not Black enough — which, in all honesty, I don’t know that I’ve met a Blacker girl than Whitney Houston.”

Babyface rejects the perception that led to the nickname Whitey. “I think that was bulls—,” he says. “‘Saving All My Love for You’ is very R&B. And she sang ‘Greatest Love of All’ more soulful than anybody.” Nevertheless, Davis recruited Babyface and his creative partner L.A. Reid — then known for their work with Karyn White, the Boys and Bobby Brown, among many others — to do something “a little more urban-oriented,” as Babyface puts it, for Houston’s third album, 1990’s “I’m Your Baby Tonight.”

Houston left an immediate impression on the producers. “To have her by the mic for the first time in our studio in Atlanta, I was like, ‘This is Whitney f— Houston, and she sounds even better than I imagined,’” Babyface says. “And this was at a time when there wasn’t any auto-tuning or vocal fixing that you could do. The voice that you heard on her records was her voice.”

Whitney Houston onstage in a white dress.

Houston returned to grandiose balladry for “The Bodyguard” and to gospel music for her 1996 film “The Preacher’s Wife.” For “My Love Is Your Love,” in 1998, she embraced a sleek, club-inspired sound in songs like “It’s Not Right But It’s Okay,” which gets a scene in the movie that shows Houston dancing excitedly around a hotel room as Davis plays her Jerkins’ demo of the track.

“When I first watched the scene, they had some fake demo they’d gotten from a website or something,” says Jerkins, whose job on the film included fact-checking the musical elements. “I was like, ‘Absolutely not.’ So I dug in my boxes and actually found the DAT of the original.”

Like many biopics, “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” speeds through the final chapters of its subject’s life. Houston’s final studio album, “I Look to You,” came out in 2009 and revealed a once-mighty voice grown smaller and huskier. Yet both Jerkins and Babyface say they’d been told by Davis and others that Houston had gotten her instrument back into shape just before she died. “She called me and told me she wanted to make ‘light-of-the-world’ music,’” says Jerkins, who assembled the movie’s soundtrack album, which complements some of Houston’s indelible hits with newly commissioned remixes.

That comeback didn’t happen, though Houston’s voice endures in her own classics — on Spotify, “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” has more than 890 million streams — and in those moments when a younger singer aims beyond her reach and somehow gets there. “Whitney opened the door for everybody,” says Babyface, be it Mariah Carey and Celine Dion in the ’90s or Ariana Grande and Demi Lovato in the 2010s. Even so, folks who worked with her agree they’ve yet to see anyone match what she could do. “People are still trying to achieve the height, the definition, the choice of notes,” says Walden.

Adds Babyface: “There’s no other record where somebody put on a better performance than ‘I Will Always Will Love You.’ That’s game over.”