MOVIE REVIEW : ‘JO JO DANCER’ REVEALS A PRYOR COMMITMENT

For the first third of “Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling” (citywide), you think that perhaps Richard Pryor has pulled one off. You virtually will him to, since he has laid a life so perilously close to his own on the line for us so unsparingly, and since he is the movie’s producer, director, co-writer and star.

A free-basing accident has almost incinerated superstar comedian Jo Jo Dancer, and while his life hangs in the balance, his spirit peels itself off his body and conducts a tour through a life almost willfully thrown away.

This first section is moving: Jo Jo’s childhood (he’s played by an endearing youngster, E’Lon Cox) in and around the homey bordello presided over by his Grandma (Carmen McRae), and later, his debut as a young comic, as fearless as he is naive, at a gangster-owned Midwestern nightclub.

Pryor’s obvious love for these characters from his own past and his canniness in casting them (Billy Eckstine as the elegantly weary cabaret singer; Art Evans as his stammering, stalwart sidekick, and especially Paula Kelly, smolderingly memorable as exotic dancer Satin Doll) gives these sequences real warmth and humanity.

But the material and the movie begin to fall in shards beyond this point; the final result avoids embarrassment by the narrowest margin. You have the feeling that Pryor had aimed for a somber, almost melancholy story, redeemed only by Jo Jo’s strength of will at the very last moment. (He says as much in a recent magazine interview.) But the film has been cranked up to give it the maximum laughs and, in the process, has lost its center.

Skittering between past and present, we trace the emergence of the comic’s distinctive style. In his first, trembling nightclub act, Jo Jo captures his diffident audience with pantomime--his great Baby-Being-Born routine. During the ‘60s, as an Afro’d stand-up comic, an incident with a heckler brings out his baaaaaad mouth. And when it doesn’t lose him his job, he tests it more and more, refining the lightning-quick, coruscating (Pryor) style.

If the writing of the rest of the film matched these professional insights, all might be very well. But, in spite of good-to-excellent performances by Barbara Williams as his smart, watchful (and white) second wife, who succumbs to cocaine through her own insecurities and takes him with her, and by Debbie Allen as his sensual, subsequent wife, what they must play is slight and superficial.

Pryor is great at the bantering tension between a pair who are instantly drawn to each other--and each unwilling to relinquish the sexual upper hand. And as himself, Jo Jo’s comic persona, an actor of shivering acuteness, he’s plainly brilliant. But his talents of writing/directing/producing don’t mesh. He has an empathic gift for his actors but barely any texture with which they can create their characters. The music is poignant (moments like Mahalia Jackson’s “In the Upper Room” and Muddy Waters’ “Mannish Boy” make whole scenes reverberate), but the film’s pace is jagged and abrupt. And the core of the film is hollow, a less deft “All That Jazz,” which, if you subtracted the dancing, was pretty lean fare.

All this really doesn’t matter; this is so clearly a film that Pryor had to do. Perhaps it would have been a different film had he been left alone to do it as he wanted. What does come out of “Jo Jo Dancer” is a sense of absolution, and of now getting on with life.

And one hopes that just around the corner is a script worthy of Pryor’s acting abilities, a director he can consult with and/or trust, a producer he can lean on. He doesn’t have to do it all himself--he only needs collaborators who are his equals.