Mister Soul: A Story about Donny Hathaway (2020)

Directed by: David Kleijwegt | 85 minutes | music, documentary

For generations to come, Donny Hathaway is an important source of inspiration. But for the average music lover, the American soul singer seems to have fallen into oblivion a bit. While many musicians who died young and tragically, such as Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye and more recently Amy Winehouse, have achieved the status of music legends because of their too short lives, memories of Hathaway have faded. Only the seasoned soul lover and the people from it remember him. And that while Hathaway can rightly be considered a musical genius. Not only because of his beautiful voice, in which the traditional gospel from his youth and the soul and R’nB that producers and audiences most loved to hear from him, but also because of his impressive possibilities as a composer. He could literally blow you away with music. According to his former manager Ed Howard, Hathaway could easily compete with Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles. “And he might have had the most soul of the three.”

His enormous talent often got in the way of Hathaway, as we see in the documentary ‘Mister Soul – A Story about Donny Hathaway’ (2019) by the Dutch filmmaker David Kleijwegt, a former music critic who thought it strange that a celebrity like Hathaway the margin was condemned. Instead of a traditional documentary about the rise and fall of the artist, he tries to paint a picture of who Donny was and how he got into a knot with himself on the basis of conversations with those closely involved. Among others, his brother and sisters, his widow, singer Roberta Flack with whom he scored his greatest hits, preacher Jesse Jackson, producer James Mtume and the aforementioned Howard. They paint a picture of the singer, who was already performing as a gospel singer at the age of four and was kept short by his dominant grandmother. When he got older and started singing other genres, such as jazz and soul, he had to give his grandmother text and explanations. She found all songs that were not about faith disgraceful and let it be known. So to reassure her, Donny said that every “baby” or “darling” he sang was actually a tribute to the Lord Jesus. He also did that to assuage his guilt. For was a status as a pop idol compatible with a life devoted to God?

Kleijwegt translates the inner struggle that Hathaway felt for years, and which kept him increasingly in its grip, into a fictional figure that he shows up in the documentary, ‘Mister Soul’. He is the personification of Donny’s madness. That’s a nice addition, but how much his mental illness gripped the singer, we really learn the most from the testimonials of people who knew him. From his widow Eulaulah, for example, who says she was pushed down the stairs by her husband and left their once idyllic abode in a hurry to protect herself and their two daughters Lalah and Kenya. From his good friend Roberta Flack, who could see in his eyes that the voices in his head were back. Or from producer Mtume who recalls the time when no fewer than 112 recordings were needed to satisfy Hathaway (and his demons). The delusions became more and more extreme. The singer was convinced that there were white men after him who had attached his brain to a machine and were now trying to steal his talent, voice and sound. And so the exceptional talent that had once brought him out of the St. Louis ghetto ultimately proved fatal: After a long day of shooting in January 1979, Hathaway jumped out of the window of his New York hotel room. He was only 33 years old.

Despite that heavy theme of mental illness and suicide, “Mister Soul – A Story about Donny Hathaway” isn’t grim. Of course Hathaway’s life story is wry and sad, but Kleijwegt also leaves room for light-hearted moments. In particular, Donny’s sisters Minette and Jackie and brother Lavall shake things up nicely with their lively and humorous intermezzos (and they also seem to be able to sing quite well, by the way). The choice of a fictional character as a metaphor for Hathaway’s illness is also a nice, idiosyncratic find. It might be useful to know before you start watching this film: ‘Mister Soul’ does not tell the complete life story of Hathaway in chronological order – major phases in his life are not or hardly discussed and we do not get a real explanation for his mental illness either – but is a loving, artistic ode to a musical genius that has always been horribly underexposed in music history.