SPINNING GOLD - Mark Reviews Movies

Spinning Gold, Hero Entertainment / Howling Wolf Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 30, 2023

This biography of music executive Neil Bogart, written and directed by the late subject's son, desperately wants to make a case for the importance of the business side of the music business. That's true to the extent that one can almost sense the marketing angles of Spinning Gold while watching it.

First off, it's a biography that mainly seems to use its subject's life as an excuse to fill the movie with plenty of recognizable songs from assorted genres. One imagines some sort of rights issues have prevented writer/director Timothy Scott Bogart from using original recordings from the famous artists being portrayed here, but that just leads to another angle. Bogart has put together a cast of professional singers of some amount of fame to cover those songs in the movie and, presumably, for its soundtrack.

Those who might want to hear Jason Derulo sing half of an Isley Brothers song, Wiz Khalifa do some George Clinton jams, or Casey Likes sound vaguely like Kiss member Gene Simmons will undoubtedly be thrilled by this jukebox musical approach. The question Bogart might have forgotten to ask, though, is whether or not anyone exists who would choose a group of cover artists over hearing the original performers.

This isn't to criticize the talents of the aforementioned performers or any of the others who have the misfortune of singing songs made by iconic artists in this movie. They do their best, and often, the versions they perform are fine. The problem, of course, is that they're also playing the real-life artists whose songs they're performing. For as much heart as Ledisi puts into Gladys Knight's "Midnight Train to Georgia" and as much power as there is in Tayla Parx's versions of a couple Donna Summer tunes, they don't sound like the people they're playing. That might sound like a nitpick, considering this movie isn't a biography of any one or group of these singers, but the collective impact of hearing imitators that don't quite or at all match the original is significant.

Beyond that, why are we talking about the music in the first place? This isn't supposed to be some greatest hits album of an era and a couple record labels visualized, after all. It's meant to be a biography of the man who gave the world this music—well, "gave" from a certain perspective that's very generous in its definition of words. Bogart wants to make the argument that none of this music—which has become "the soundtrack of your lives," in a line that should give one an idea of how blunt Bogart is in making his point—would exist without his father, who had multiple occupations (and names) but is best remembered serving as the head of a couple of record labels.

The biggest success story was Casablanca Records, which gave us a lot of disco and stuck with Kiss until the company figured out how to sell a band that was better seen, apparently, than heard. Neil (Jeremy Jordan) accomplishes all of this with his independent company in about a span of a decade, which is some kind of accomplishment, to be sure—even if the movie doesn't quite know how to sell us on that idea, except by telling us over and over again that it's true.

The man's life is divided into his professional side and his personal one, and neither is particularly interesting. A falling counter of money shows us how much the company goes into debt from its inception, as Neil and his team of fellow executives, marketing people, and managers try and fail to sell the country on his artistic discoveries or coups—such as getting Knight and her Pips to leave Motown Records. Eventually, it all turns around for the company, even as Neil loses one family with wife Beth (Michelle Monaghan) and starts to consider a new one with Joyce (Lindsy Fonseca). The movie glosses over all of this, as well as Neil's casual drug use and connections to the mafia and an apparent gambling addiction that he learned from his father (played by Jason Isaacs), because it's not an addiction, apparently, if it finally does pay off in the millions.

Mostly, though, it seems as if Bogart cares more about the music of Spinning Gold than the story being told (There's an ungainly flashback structure that's particularly confounding). That makes sense, because, for the most part, the original music featured here is great. It's really too bad none of that original music actually exists in this movie.

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