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American Symphony Movie Review

American Symphony is a 2023 documentary film directed by Matthew Heineman and starring Jon Batiste. It’s a very disappointing movie that could have been so much better.

Musician Jon Batiste sets out to compose a symphony. Then his life partner, author Suleika Jaouad, learns that her cancer is back. This documentary tries to paint a portrait of this artist and what he went through in 2022. It focuses just on this one year. That was not a bad choice on its own, but the execution is problematic, so it ended up being a frustrating viewing experience.

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The movie tried to juggle too many things all at once. There is a significant portion of the movie that is devoted to Jon Batiste’s musical career and how his style fits within the wider medium today. The highlight of this section was the exploration of his style and what it means and how others perceive his music in regards to genre and influence. That was the most interesting subject in that area.

But the scenes that focused on him playing music dragged and were quite tedious. There are way too many moments in the movie when nothing happens and too much runtime is devoted to concerts and performances. A more confidently made and better edited film would have been better focused too.

The lack of focus is the main area of disconnect here for me personally. While Jon Batiste himself is very sympathetic and his life story is worth seeing, he deserved a better movie. The entire cancer storyline, although obviously very touching and at times quite effective, was at the end of the day rather sidelined. This is a very important subject and it should have received better treatment.

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American Symphony is, thus, thematically intriguing and complex, but too scattershot and lacking a cohesive narrative. It’s a snapshot in someone’s life that is individually strong as a string of these disparate threads, but as a whole it left me wanting for more.