There have been scores of TV films following the ascent (and generally fall) of pop gatherings, the greater part of them dull, a couple of them energizing. While I know the profit from interest in observing any of these is low, I’m as yet a sucker for showbiz adventures this way. (My record-breaking fave: Dead Man’s Curve, made in 1978 about the sea shore music couple Jan and Dean, played by Bruce Davison and a pre-Battlestar Galactica Richard Hatch.) So when it went to The New Edition Story, a three-night “occasion” film on BET beginning Tuesday, I went to the undertaking with high expectations and low assumptions.
My dedication to the class was compensated: The New Edition Story is a particularly very much made, quick moving, imperfections and everything biopic. It follows the standard story way — hardscrabble children hustling to become famous, accomplishing fame just to have the gathering riven with infighting and conscience. In any case, that account is a solid spine, one that upholds top notch exhibitions, and the cast does a prominently fine occupation of re-making the music of these young fellows, who gave us such prime pop-R&B as “Candy Girl,” “Popcorn Love,” and “Mr. Phone Man.”
As composed by Abdul Williams and coordinated by Chris Robinson, The New Edition Story gets the story at its underlying foundations, in the Roxbury part of Boston, where Bobby Brown, Michael Bivens, and Ricky Bell structure a vocal gathering that ventures into a quintet in the wake of the Jackson 5’s gigantic achievement. Taken in by a chief played by Wood Harris (who wouldn’t need The Wire’s Avon Barksdale as their supervisor?) and guided to fame by maker Maurice Starr (a brilliantly world-tired Faizon Love), every part is played by at any rate two entertainers as they develop from children to grown-up; all of them is amazing, which is no little accomplishment.
The subtleties are oftentimes very clever, for example, the re-formation of a late-’70s show at Manhattan’s Roseland theater, in which New Edition was top-charged over Madonna and Kurtis Blow. Proto-rapper Blow, auteur of “The Breaks” and played by Melvin Jackson Jr., takes one glance at the youthful high schooler New Edition in their uniform suits and ties and says pretentiously, “What are you all? Country of Islam?”
We realize how the story closes: Bobby Brown leaves/is kicked out (the film figures out how to give equivalent load to the two hypotheses), three individuals leave to frame Bell Biv DeVoe (recollect the new jack swing of “Poison”?), and there are different scenes of awful conduct and more regrettable. Yet, The New Edition Story stays dynamic and cunning. It takes a gathering that is apparently misjudged and gives it a sparkling feature.