It’s bandleader Ike Turner (Laurence Fishburne) who provides her break, seduces her with his flashy charm, renames her, weds her and runs her into the ground in pursuit of money and fame. Fishburne is amazing as her coke-snorting, guilt-tripping, violent Svengali. He looks nothing like the real stringbean Ike, but he makes this monster chillingly human.
Gibson’s movie charges exuberantly from melodramatic to musical highlight, taking its share of liberties with the facts (eager to make the young Tina a wholesome naif, it neglects to mention she already had one kid when she hooked up with Ike). But the cliches of the genre go down easy. As Tina, the tautly powerful Angela Bassett, lip-syncing to Turner’s singing, manages to be persuasive in spite of the fact that she’s really too severe and pent-up for the part. The unfettered joyousness of Tina’s stage presence may elude her, but the movie makes up for it with its strutting rhythms, its wittily tacky production design, its evocative wigs and costumes, which bring a musical era to life. As a celebration of one of the greatest rock-and-roll troupers, this movie definitely has the juice for the job.
