Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami

This film isn't a career retrospective or a treatise on the importance and influence of Grace Jones. (Someone should feel free to do either or both of those.) The director starts filming Ms. Jones in the mid-2000s and simply observes her on stage and off. She follows her home to Jamaica, where the diva mellows into a daughter, sister and parishioner. She watches her record her 2008 album "Hurricane" and become a grandmother.

There's a trip to church where Ms. Jones's brother, Noel, preaches and her mother sings "His Eye Is on the Sparrow." There's a night spent clubbing. Ms. Jones was in her mid-50s when the movie finds her and turns 72 next month. So for someone whose hits include the 1981 masterpiece of metaphor, "Pull Up to the Bumper," and who was a fixture at New York's Studio 54, her partying seems less like a splurge and more like a form of exercise.

We're not given any kind of chronology. We're left to guess about what year it is or what city the shows are in. But concepts of time, space and location might actually be besides the point when your movie stars a Grace Jones who's determined to look inward the way she does on "Hurricane," the most obviously personal and autobiographical of her albums. And we watch Ms. Jones ruminate about the source of all that scariness and intimidation in her stage persona. It's her abusive stepfather, and he's got a hold on her still. This particular return to Jamaica appears to have stirred up a lot for her.

Grace Jones is an iconoclast, basically. And I imagine a downside of iconoclasm is you never get to be a human being. This is someone whose long career as a model, actress and undervalued musician has veered, sometimes uncomfortably, into both the sub- and superhuman.

Ms. Jones is at her most vampiric but also her most free. Recommended for the truest, die-hard fans of Grace Jones. For all others, read between the above lines.

This is half concert film, half intimate portrait. What I took a way from it most was the stark contrast between the stunning visuals and slick production of her performances and the bare bones existence of Spanish Town in Jamaica where she was born. (Yet here's a certain tranquility to the people we meet there.) Fortunately the subject of the film is someone to whom a lot of people could listen and watch all day. For those who aren't into her, 115 minutes may seem too long, but even they would have to marvel at someone in her late sixties moving with such agility and athleticism. (She sweats buckets.) I do think she could have let her guard down a little more. I don't think we got as much of the woman behind the image as we could have, but she shares a lot of her history, and that is enough. Sophie Fiennes dad an excellent job balancing the spectacle and the person, with as much as Grace was willing to reveal.

There is no doubt Grace Jones is a great subject. For anything, be it her music, her performance or as a muse. She has a lot of history and above anything else, a character.

Who knows the direction of the director is going. I was patient for the first 30 minutes waiting for something to happen. Somewhere along the line, she probably threw her original idea up in the air and just wing it. The result is a bad cut and paste project any high school student aspiring to do a documentary about his high school glee club can surpass this mess by seven fold.

Grace Jones exults ultimate good taste in extremely deeply funky transcending music thanks to her amazing voice, her collaborations over the past 40 years, she demonstrates joyful art in how she masters her style and how she totally commands the show on stage. I watched the UK Premiere of Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami at the London BFI Southbank, each of the amazingly beautifully filmed song performances end by impulsive audience applause as if you're at the concert alternating with scenes that show Grace Jones's nature and her constant grasp at mastering happiness and trying to contaminate that happiness to the people around her in her life, producing good belly laughs throughout the film as we get to see who she is in her life.

I hope that this movie leads to more content from Grace Jones and from the people who agree with her taste, Please make more music like this, and please write, direct and distribute more movies like this one! She declined a role in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, I'd like to see someone to make for her a Grace Runner movie where she gets the leading role.

This documentary is quite needed, many has been mesmerized by the antics of Grace Jones. The exotic myth is dispelled, filmmaker Fiennes (related to actor Ralph Fiennes) tries to show Jones's origins via beautiful snapshots of her native Jamaica with on-location candid family and friends interviews. Aside of reliving Jones's childhood memories, the documentary depicts the frustration of an artist trying to keep her creativity free from the media and music industry. The film does a full circle for this iconic pioneer in club music and performance art: Jones's life is humanized!