Movie review: ‘Benda Bilili!’

“Benda Bilili!” earns its exclamation point. It’s a feel-good movie that actually makes you feel good, a story that will have you shaking your head in astonishment and moving your feet to some unstoppable rhythms.

That’s because this documentary set in Kinshasa, the capital city of the Democratic Republic of Congo, features the high energy and propulsive music of Staff Benda Bilili, a band that is as unusual as it is overpowering.

That name, translated from the local language of Lingala, means “look beyond appearances,” an appropriate title for a group of musicians that includes several men in wheelchairs because of childhood polio.

That this group, some of whose members started out sleeping on the streets, should have become the toast of Europe and the winners of world music’s prestigious Womex Award, is something not to be believed.

Recording it all was the French filmmaking team of Renaud Barret and Florent de La Tullaye, who became intoxicated with Kinshasa and made numerous trips there. These men went beyond being observers — they played key roles in the band’s success. But when they decided, in 2004, to make Benda Bilili’s dream of recording a CD a reality, they had no idea that the journey would take five years.

Barret and De La Tullaye first met Ricky, one of Benda Bilili’s founders and its de facto leader. Through him they met the other key members of the group and learned something of the complex world of Kinshasa’s post-apocalyptic streets, where these polio victims get around in handmade “Mad Max”-type tricycles that are pushed by children recruited from the city’s legion of homeless street kids.

Though these individuals do not have use of their legs, they don’t have the temperament for self-pity. They are art of a larger community of energetic though impoverished polio-afflicted men, some of whom can be seen playing their own version of soccer. They believe, as Ricky sings early in the film, that “a man’s life is never over. Luck shows up unannounced.”

One of the key ways in which the filmmakers influenced the course of Benda Bilili’s career was in introducing the band to a young musician they came across in another part of Kinshasa, a 13-year-old prodigy named Roger.

Super-serious and as devoted to his music as Andrés Segovia, Roger is a virtuoso on an instrument of his own devising, the satonge, which consists of a string, a flexible piece of wood and a tin can. Both he and the band take to each other at once but recognize that they have a long way to go. “I am patient,” the imperturbable young man says. “I know my time will come.” And so it does.

We see the band rehearsing in the relative quiet of Kinshasa’s threadbare, Kafkaesque city zoo, and eavesdrop as the musicians dream of going to Europe and becoming as big a Congolese star as Papa Wemba.

Always serious about their music, the musicians are now even more determined to take advantage of this new opportunity, but they have never been in a studio before and, as it turns out, have to deal with personal tragedies that push making music into second place.

“Benda Bilili!” is especially good at capturing the catastrophic nature of life in Kinshasa, featuring surreal scenes like a late-night confrontation between Papa Ricky and a dwarf he accuses of stealing from him. When the band’s album is released, we see them listening on a portable radio during a zoo rehearsal as the local DJ talks about these very zoo sessions.

The best part of the film is watching in disbelief as, after years of dealing with problems, the band achieves success across Europe. When one of their inebriated fans back in Kinshasa grandly insists, “Never in the history of the world has this been seen,” we are tempted to agree.

kenneth.turan@latimes.com