Showtime's `Hendrix': Not quite the right experience

Coming down from our summer of Jimi Hendrix love has left fans a little hungry. Submitted for our edification: Experience Music Project, a shrine to the legend that is filled with objects to worship but short on historical meat.

In August, A&E presented "Biography: Jimi Hendrix," a bleak, bitter look at the rise and drug-plagued fall of the artist. The "Biography" segment focused less on Hendrix's artistry than on his narcotics usage and precarious psyche, interspersing this litany with obligatory iconographic moments.

Now Showtime goes the opposite route with "Hendrix," premiering on the 30th anniversary of the guitar god's death, Sunday at 8 p.m. Theirs is a sugary treat, painting Hendrix's life and demise in the prettiest psychedelic colors, spooning the iconography on thick while glossing over whatever dark spots they could. Wood Harris plays him as a man in limbo, caught between the mania of inspiration and a wan naivete about how the world works.

"There are a few chosen people who are here to help get these people out of this certain sleepiness that they're in," he explains in the film's beginning. The next two hours show how he wakes them up - with fire.

"Hendrix" is not about the artist as a man, but the artist as a legend. He thinks he can heal everything through his electric religion, and from most of the film's point of view, he does. It was an unrealistic idealism in his time, though his colorblind artistry reshaped rock and blues irrevocably for future musicians of all races. But the movie also shows how in an America polarized by race, he doesn't have support among black people, and whites want to bleed him dry in corporate offices.

One of "Hendrix's" successes, aside from casting dead-ringer Harris in the title role, is that it shows how everyone around Hendrix exploited him; he just couldn't say no. Harris captures Hendrix's go-along, "it's all cool" attitude that got him in trouble with unscrupulous manager Michael Jeffery (Billy Zane), lawyers, groupies and anyone else who could get a chip of his soul. Seattle knows the battle continued after Hendrix's death, as his father was forced to sue family friend Leo Branton Jr. and producer Alan Douglas to get the family's fair share of the royalties.

But "Hendrix" just isn't all that bold. It's well-acted and eminently forgettable; the filmmakers didn't go for the emotional, historical jugular. The strained relationship Al Hendrix (played by Dorian Harewood) and his son had in life is one of many warts covered up in the Showtime picture, along with Hendrix's hardscrabble childhood, his mother's death from cirrhosis of the liver when he was a teen, and his painful shyness. You won't even get to see just how dastardly Jeffery is. In the movie he's merely a hard-liner whom Hendrix, in a passing moment, accuses of thievery; we never get to see he was right.

Much of the important stuff is played to the hilt. Harris has Hendrix's voice and carriage down, from the way he plays guitar to his free-form ramblings in conversation and interviews. Re-creations of Hendrix's famous moments - the smashed, immolated guitar, his rendition of the national anthem - won't send chills down your spine as much as his interactions with early producer Chas Chandler (Christian Potenza). Vivica A. Fox is mere window dressing as erstwhile lover and longtime friend Fay Pridgeon.

A few things will have you laughing out loud, particularly a fleeting inclusion of his famed session with the Plaster Casters. They explain how they intend to, ahem, bring Jimi's "rig" to attention before immortalizing it in a glass vase filled with dental alginate.

"You're going to need a bigger vase," he quips with a smile.

"Hendrix" isn't likely to make the Paul Allens of the world want to kiss the sky, even if it is a lovely dessert after a summer of love and consumption. We're still waiting for a main course of substance. The question is, who's up for providing the true experience?

Melanie McFarland is comin' to getcha! She can be reached at 206-464-2256 or by e-mail at mmcfarland@seattletimes.com.