The fine screenplay is by the British brothers Jez and John-Henry Butterworth. The directing is in the capable hands of Tate Taylor(“The Help”/”Chicken Party”/”Pretty Ugly People”), who shows he cares about the music above all else. Tate also gives the biopic a fresh look, as he tells Brown’s incredible rags to riches story by using a non-linear approach. The time line approach is replaced by following a smashing beat of its own pulse, which makes a dent in the conventional biopic but doesn’t completely remove it from being conventional. The negative about the pic’s non-linear approach is that the jumbled time line is hard to follow. It also skips over many events in Brown’s colorful and full life, leaving it incomplete. On the other hand, the reward is a high energy and entertaining film, one that avoids standard biopic clichés. It has no trouble capturing the legend’s rough childhood upbringing, his unique singing style, his lifetime anger and abrasiveness, his popularity among both black and white audiences, his volatile disposition, and his ambitious narcissistic career moves.

The pic opens in 1988, in Augusta, Georgia, at a mall site where Brown maintains a storefront business. It depicts the middle-aged Brown at one of his worst moments, when he threatens with a loaded rifle a roomful of insurance agents, one of whom accidentally used Brown’s private bathroom located in the same building. It cuts back and forth from here-on to Brown’s impoverished backwoods South Carolina childhood and continues following him when uprooted at 4 to rural Georgia, where he must deal with an abusive father (Lennie James) and a neglectful mother (Viola Davis). It then haphazardly covers some of the major incidents in his life that include his start in showbiz with a group called The Famous Flames and his subsequent successful career with him the boss.