A gospel written in Minneapolis
The Kid does not walk into First Avenue so much as detonate inside it. Albert Magnoli’s Purple Rain, released in July 1984, pretends to be a story about a Minneapolis musician and his violent father, his mother, a rival named Morris Day, and a woman called Apollonia. It is those things, thinly, and then it is something better: a feature-length argument that Prince and the Revolution were already a cinema before anyone rented them a plot.
The songs do the real directing. Let’s Go Crazy opens the church and the joke in the same breath. The Beautiful Ones is a crawl across the floor that the camera knows not to tidy. When Doves Cry, built without a bass, with Prince playing most of it himself, still sounds like a room with the furniture dragged out so the feeling has space. Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman are not decorations. In the film, as in the band, they are the pressure that makes him let other hands on the songs. Purple Rain itself, the long guitar weather at the end, is filmed like a service. People cry because the chord tells them to, not because a script underlines it.
Morris Day and Jerome Benton, and The Time behind them, keep the movie from drowning in its own bruise. They are funny, sharp, and local, a reminder that this scene was a competition, not a coronation. The domestic scenes are clumsier. A father who hits, a son who repeats the gesture, a redemption that arrives because the third act needs one. The film knows no restraint, which is both its pulp and its honesty. Darling Nikki would soon be held up by the parents who wanted warning stickers on records. Prince had already put the warning in the song and danced anyway.
One of the greatest rock movies of all time.
(Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, 1987)
Shot in the clubs and streets he actually used, the picture won the Academy Award for original song score in 1985, a prize that sounds administrative next to what the year felt like. The album and the film occupied the same summer. Pop, in 1984, could still be a local argument staged for the whole country. The Kid learns to share credit. The lesson is corny. The music that carries it is not. You leave remembering the white guitar more than the moral, which is how pop is supposed to smuggle its morals.
Later Prince films tried to repeat the spell and found that a spell resents repetition. Purple Rain stays because it was made at the moment the songs were larger than the story and the story was humble enough, just barely, to stand aside. Minneapolis looks small. The sound does not. A performer who trusted nobody writes a movie about learning to trust the band, and for two hours you believe the lesson because you can hear it.
