Searching for Sugar Man (***1/4)

I’ve always been impressed by the ability of foreigners to appropriate America’s culture and make it their own. (It happens less the other way around.) We sometimes make a joke of it, as with David Hasselhoff’s popularity in Germany, or Jerry Lewis’s in France. But, on the evidence presented here, and it’s pretty good evidence, Sixto Rodriguez is bigger that Hasselhoff, or Lewis…in South Africa.

That the Detroit native made only two albums in the early 1970s and remained completely unknown everywhere else, including Detroit, makes the story unlikely. Even more unlikely, and impossible in today’s digitally connected world, is that Rodriguez heard nothing of his overseas following. Nor did the South Africans know anything about the man who was a household name there. (At least among the white population. Although Rodriguez is said to have been an inspiration to whites who opposed apartheid, his fan base does not appear to be multiracial.) Fans pored over lyrics for clues about the artist. There were rumors — he was said to have committed suicide before a hostile audience — but that’s all.

So this documentary — by a Swede, Malik Bendjelloul — is a kind of detective story as much as anything else. Bendjelloul also managed to interview the producers of the two albums, who attest to his genius, but that’s not the interesting part. What turns out to have happened to Rodriguez, including his missed opportunity for 1970s stardom, is both unusual and mundane. And the movie itself has provided its own touching ending to the story, with its soundtrack and Rodriguez’s re-released 1970 debut finally granting him the chart placings that eluded him 40 years ago. The music itself, incidentally, fits into the emerging singer-songwriter sensibility of the time, but with generally grittier lyrics and a haunting musical quality somewhat reminiscent of another 1970s artist who has re-emerged, Nick Drake, with some Bob Dylan influences. There’s plenty of it heard in the movie, which cannot explain its enduring qualities nor the vagaries of circumstance and coincidence that can affect what becomes popular.


IMDb link


viewed 10/17/12 7:45 pm at Ritz Five and reviewed 10/17/12