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Honeydripper
Emerging Pictures


6.8

based on 27 reviews
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based on 6 votes
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FILM:

MPAA RATING: PG-13 for brief violence and some suggestive material

Starring Danny Glover, Charles S. Dutton, Lisa Gay Hamilton, Stacy Keach, Mary Steenburgen, Yaya DaCosta, Sean Patrick Thomas, and Gary Clark Jr.

It's 1950, and it's a make-or-break weekend for Tyrone Purvis (Danny Glover), the proprietor of the Honeydripper Lounge. Deep in debt, Tyrone is desperate to bring back the crowds that used to come to his place. He decides to lay off his longtime blues singer Bertha Mae and announces that he has hired a famous guitar player, Guitar Sam, for a one-night-only gig in order to save the club. Into town drifts Sonny Blake, a young man with nothing to his name but big dreams and the guitar case in his hand. Rejected by Tyrone when he applies to play at the Honeydripper, he is intercepted by the corrupt local sheriff, arrested for vagrancy, and rented out as an unpaid cotton picker to the highest bidder. But when Tyrone's ace-in-the-hole fails to materialize at the train station, his desperation leads him back to Sonny and the strange, wire-dangling object in his guitar case. The Honeydripper Lounge is all set to play its part in rock and roll history. (Emerging Pictures)

GENRE(S):	Drama
WRITTEN BY:	John Sayles
DIRECTED BY:	John Sayles
RELEASE DATE:	DVD: June 24, 2008 Theatrical: December 28, 2007
RUNNING TIME:	123 minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	USA

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

LA Weekly Ernest Hardy

Honeydripper is classic Sayles cinema: an insightful sketch of assorted common folk whose criss-crossing dreams and agendas unfold against larger, more powerful (and sometimes crushing) sociopolitical and cultural forces.

Variety John Anderson

The result is one of Sayles' best films. The music, a mix of blues, seminal rock and newcomer Gary Clark Jr.'s performance, will be an obvious draw, as will the performances by some leading African-American actors.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Rich with characters and flowing with music.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

Danny Glover, as hard-rock reliable as Spencer Tracy in his prime, plays onetime pianist Tyrone "Pine Top" Purvis.

Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir

Honeydripper offers a leisurely, atmospheric production with lots of time to appreciate his largely African-American cast, along with rocking musical interludes and just the faintest wash of spirituality.

Los Angeles Times Kevin Crust

Music may be Honeydripper's most indelible element and Sayles and longtime collaborator, composer Mason Daring, seamlessly incorporate several original songs alongside the soundtrack's period tunes.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

It's about ordinary people living in the shadow of nagging, day-to-day racism, and about the music that reminds them of what's right with the world rather than what's wrong.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

Typical of a pretty good Sayles movie. There are few, if any, heroes and villains.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

With Honeydripper, Sayles has done what he always does: bring together a group of characters and allow us to relish their interaction. His affection for the characters is both obvious and infectious. We like them, warts and all.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

In its first half, Honeydripper trickles. In its second, it really flows.

Miami Herald Connie Ogle

''Everything got a rhythm, even pulling cotton off the plant,'' a field hand offers helpfully. Like his eager young bluesman when he finally hits the stage, Sayles hits exactly the right notes.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Bill White

John Sayles ventures into August Wilson territory with Honeydripper.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

The subtlety is the beauty of it.

The New Yorker David Denby

At its best when the characters sit around, dither, and ruminate. Moviemaking seems to have become almost magically easy for this independent writer-director. He builds a detailed atmosphere, brings his good people and his bad together, and lets them jabber at one another; the virtuosity is rhetorical rather than visual.

The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt

His heart -- and musical soul -- is in the right place, but the film makes you at times uncomfortable with black and Southern stereotypes that may hinder some from fully enjoying an otherwise benign and cheerful tall tale of the Saturday night when rock came to rural Alabama.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias

There are precisely zero surprises in how things play out--the main thread is basically "Big Night" revisited--but the film gets better as it goes along, and it closes with a rousing musical flourish, as immensely charismatic newcomer Clark Jr. finally hits the stage. At last, Sayles' sleepy drama wakes with a start.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

There is a great movie to be made about the first stirrings of rock 'n' roll. Honeydripper is not that film, but it certainly whets your appetite for it.

Austin Chronicle Josh Rosenblatt

Honeydripper’s story isn’t anything you haven’t seen a dozen times before, but where Sayles succeeds (where Sayles always succeeds) is in his ability to dramatize the psychological and linguistic details that give identity to a subculture struggling for survival.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

A contemplative fable, Honeydripper locates the moment but misses the heart-pounding, gut-wrenching explosion -- the history is there, the thrill isn't.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

Has John Sayles finally lost his mojo? How anyone could take a subject like the moment the Delta blues went electric and suck the joy and fury out of it is anybody's guess, but the talky, dull "Honeydripper" represents playwriting rather than filmmaking. And didactic playwriting at that.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

Like previous films by the literary-minded auteur John Sayles, Honeydripper takes forever to develop its characters, its period and its location. But once it's done all that, the payoffs are rich.

The New York Times Stephen Holden

Honeydripper is agreeable, well-intentioned and very, very slow. Sadly, it illustrates the difference between an archetype and a stereotype. When the first falls flat, it turns into the other and becomes a cliché.

Empire Anna Hart

A gentle, enjoyable musical fable.

Portland Oregonian Staff (Not credited)

flat and disappointing.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

True to his stolid, humanist instincts and characteristically stodgy directorial style, writer-director John Sayles creates a story more educational than engrossing.

New York Post Kyle Smith

The movie is well-acted, but it's as talky as if it were written for the stage, with fatally slow pacing. Strictly for hard-core Sayles fans and maybe for lovers of American roots music.

Washington Post Ann Hornaday

Trudging nobly under a mantle of impeccably earnest intentions and a fussy, too-quaint-by-half production design, Honeydripper lags and drags to its utterly predictable end. There's not a spark of spontaneity or soul about it.

The average user rating for this movie is 6.8 (out of 10) based on 6 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Terry B. gave it a10:
Talk about "vibe"!!! Great !!!

Lisa N. gave it a7:
In John Sayles' latest film, Danny Glover plays a struggling nightclub owner in 1950's Alabama. Surrounded by obstacles, he puts everything behind one last attempt to save his club and books a Saturday night performance by a famed guitar player. The story, partially inspired by Sayles' short story, "Keeping Time," is full of a community of complex fully-realized characters. And although the plot moves along slowly, you can not help but feel drawn into their plights. While this film is not nearly as wonderful as some of Sayles' finest work (such as "Lone Star" or "Passionfish"), this film is a definitely a worthwhile watch.

Tomasz W. gave it a0:
Honeydripper is an embarrassing failure on many fronts mercilessly exposing Sayles's deficiencies as a director and a total lack of talent as a writer. It's sluggish and painfully predictable in plot development, handicapped by wooden acting (best represented by a zombie performance of Danny Glover) and stagey sets, and poisoned with grating racial and cultural stereotypes. The story has unbreachable holes, characters lack reasonable motivations, and the whole film looks like a an expensive high school show.

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Honeydripper Emerging Pictures

Honeydripper
Emerging Pictures