In a scene from the new biopic Jimi: All Is By My Side, a relatively unknown Jimi Hendrix, talking to someone on a pay phone at the London rock club the Bag O’ Nails, jealously watches his British girlfriend leave with another man and, when she returns, beats her to the floor with the telephone receiver. The scene has ignited a firestorm of controversy: Kathy Etchingham, the woman in question, has called it a complete fabrication, and Charles R. Cross, author of Room Full of Mirrors: A Biography of Jimi Hendrix, has said the incident never happened, despite the fact that something very close to it appears in his own book. The movie’s producers have defended writer-director John Ridley (screenwriter of 12 Years a Slave), insisting that “the facts upon which he based his screenplay were independently substantiated by an outside company.” True or not, the now-notorious scene is emblematic of a movie that portrays Hendrix as a more resentful, less pleasant man than the gentle, moon-kissed mystic he presented to the cameras.
To really understand Hendrix, Ridley would have had to reach much farther back, to his bruising years as the impoverished eldest child of two bickering, alcoholic parents. Hendrix’s mother died when he was 15, and his father had no use for him. Jimi: All Is By My Side hints at this traumatic upbringing when Hendrix, newly arrived in London, calls his father back in Seattle and tries to impress upon him that his musical career is finally taking off. Al Hendrix—who would become a wealthy man after his son died—demands to know where Jimi stole the money that got him to the UK, and reads him the riot act for presuming to call collect. As a child, Hendrix grew so frightened by his parents’ pitched battles that he would sometimes hide in a closet; this pattern repeated into his adulthood, though instead of hiding in a closet, he hid in his music, and the walls opened out into the universe.
Directed by John Ridley
