A Jazzman’s Blues Parent Guide

A young, sensitive musician, Bayou (Joshua Boone) is treated cruelly by his father (E. Roger Mitchell), brother Willie Earl (Austin Scott), and most of the neighbors. The only exception to the nearly universal bullying is Leanne (Solea Pfeiffer), the girl who lives next door with her grandfather. Bayou and Leanne go stargazing late at night, keeping each other company, and inevitably falling in love. But Leanne’s mother, Ethel (Lana Young) has bigger plans for her beautiful daughter than the artsy son of a washerwoman, and spirits her off to Boston to make their fortune.

Although Bayou never gets over Leanne, life goes on. He helps his mother move to a bigger county where they open a dance club for the black residents. The work doesn’t pay well, but they make enough to live on, and Bayou sings on stage. Life is good until Leanne comes back – engaged to a white man. Her mother lost everything in Boston, and rather than come home empty handed, has forced Leanne to pass for white and marry the sheriff’s brother. Bayou still loves her and dreams of getting her out of her new life…somehow.

This uninspiring Jim-Crow-era rehash of Romeo and Juliet might be more interesting if it didn’t feel like a bad Hallmark movie created by a high school theater class. The tired familiarity of the plot means the audience can guess major events roughly half an hour in advance, and when they finally catch up on screen, they somehow manage to be disappointing. It doesn’t help that everyone except that protagonist and his mother are decidedly unlikeable for a variety of reasons, mostly to do with outrageous stupidity. Leanne (our Juliet) is dumber than a sack of oatmeal and views all relationships as transactional. Despite growing up in rural Georgia, she seems blissfully unaware of the violent consequences of her reckless, impulsive actions.

Then there are the content concerns. Parents will not be comfortable with teens of any age watching a movie that features incestuous rape (including some posterior nudity) and frequent intravenous heroin use. Even in a better movie, these would be serious issues, but this bland, trite, and thoroughly pointless foray into the Deep South doesn’t even qualify as watchable. It barely even musters the energy to be preachy, which would somehow have been an improvement. I can’t even say I was surprised when the movie tried so thoroughly to bore me to death - as soon as the credits say “written and directed by Tyler Perry”, you know you’re in for a tedious lineup of bad clichés.