Space Jam
Tribeca Festival
MOVIE REVIEW
Sun Ra: Do the Impossible (2025)
No shortage already of moving pictures studying Sun Ra from one direction or another, whether tackling the man, the music, the mysticism, the fact he said he was from the planet Saturn, or some combo of the lot. Christine Turner's documentary "Sun Ra: Do the Impossible" keeps the lid on its mind-expanding contents by narrowing the focus, mostly to testimonies from past members of the Sun Ra Arkestra about life in the big man's big band, plus some scholarly perspective on the social currents swirling around him in the civil rights era. It doesn't follow those threads too far out to other stations, such as his personal life, or influence on Kenneth Anger and the American underground, or his beaming directly into the nation's living rooms via "Saturday Night Live" in 1978. It's a sampler rather than a study guide, a summary of something resistant to summary; a Sunny interval.
There's plenty of the band's music, in small slices. All projects trying to summarize the Sun Ra live experience, with its dance and poetry and theatrics, have to decide what to do with the tunes, including the lengthy improvisational soundscapes that gambol on for 15 minutes. A brief sample is probably the only option, although the descriptions you hear of the music's transcendental effects might have been boosted by longer exposure to the chemicals themselves. Sun Ra started off blending sinuous bebop with the jazz colors of Duke Ellington and the experimental musings of Thelonious Monk, even before he embraced electronica. The documentary reports on the meeting between Sun Ra and synthesizer pioneer Robert Moog that supposedly left the latter gazing at the former in wonder. Tasked with the impossible, the closed-caption subtitles do their best, opting for "static noise" and "disturbing music" among other labels. Eventually Sun Ra creates the Space Chord, a variable musical entity intended to jolt a listener clean out of whatever mud-bound terrestrial mindset they were stuck in before it arrived; the subtitles don't even attempt that one.
Whatever his flaws as a human, and Arkestra members report on a few with affection, Sun Ra preached the gospel of changing yourself as a step towards changing the world, for which there is a lot to be said. He was the right man on the spot for some of the psychedelic seekers of the 1960s and 1970s, who were receptive to messages he had by then been beaming out for a while. Seekers of the 2020s tuning in might catch a timely vibe, quite a bit of the 1970s having boomeranged back to us. Climate damage, political buffoonery, paranoid breakdown, Middle East disaster, radical change and total acceleration: all '70s hits now back in the charts. Since they are, maybe some of the Sun Ra words wafted in on the Arkestra's broadband channel might be worth a look too: don't be trapped in cycles; don't get locked into acts you don't want to do. Hear the Space Chord. Turn or burn.
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