Justin Tim­ber­lake + the Ten­nessee Kids

My favourite Justin Tim­ber­lake song appears in one of the best sequences in Jonathan Demme’s phe­nom­e­nal doc­u­men­tary of the singer’s last con­cert on his two-year tour. Before Tim­ber­lake starts singing the first verse of ​‘My Love’, his pianist plays a del­i­cate arpeg­gio. Demme’s cam­era focus­es first on the musician’s stead­fast yet grace­ful fin­gers, then ris­es up to his face as he looks over to the singer who, while turn­ing his back to the pianist, lis­tens to his chords.

After a few silent sec­onds, the pianist, look­ing back down at the keys, appears to acknowl­edge that Tim­ber­lake wants a few more notes to build up the sus­pense even fur­ther. Tim­ber­lake may be the one stand­ing in the spot­light, fac­ing an audi­ence who waits anx­ious­ly to hear his voice, but this atmos­phere of delight­ful antic­i­pa­tion sur­round­ing him is the fruit of his word­less col­lab­o­ra­tion with his pianist in par­tic­u­lar, and the whole troupe in general.

Demme indeed finds in Timberlake’s crew of Ten­nessee Kids a diverse fam­i­ly rather than a group of anony­mous employ­ees. The film begins when the troupe arrives at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas and with each musi­cian, dancer and chore­o­g­ra­ph­er intro­duc­ing her­self to the cam­era. All have been part of the band for more than a year, and all are smil­ing. Just as he did with David Byrne’s troupe for his life-giv­ing 1984 doc­u­men­tary Stop Mak­ing Sense, Demme ded­i­cates him­self to show­ing this tight­ness of the band. Once again, the result is a joy­ous cel­e­bra­tion of music as a uni­fy­ing force, cut­ting across all bound­aries – be they race, gen­der or age – to cre­ate beau­ty and express feel­ings in all their inten­si­ty and universality.

Rely­ing ful­ly on the pos­si­bil­i­ties offered by dig­i­tal cin­e­ma, Demme allows his cam­era to explore the stage from every angle and dis­tance to present the show as at once a com­mu­nal and a deeply per­son­al expe­ri­ence for its per­form­ers. Danc­ing in line and in uni­son, all in suit and tie, the men and women appear all togeth­er with Tim­ber­lake –the women too per­form the crotch-grab­bing move, because why not? – before break­ing into their own moves.

The show itself is designed to high­light the unique qual­i­ties of each artist, but no one could have cap­tured those idio­syn­crasies bet­ter than Demme: in an aston­ish­ing track­ing shot, the faces of each per­former as they inter­act with each oth­er while singing and danc­ing to ​‘Drink You Away’ appear one after the oth­er, their dif­fer­ent expres­sions all uni­fied by the soul­ful words of the song.

Demme doesn’t for­get to include the stage and light design­ers in his amorous por­trait of the art of per­for­mance and turns their work into pure cin­e­mat­ic plea­sures. On this stage, Demme too becomes a tech­ni­cian, ful­ly deploy­ing his knowl­edge of film­mak­ing to find the most expres­sive ways to approach the visu­al and spa­tial dynam­ics at play. The tran­si­tion between ​‘I Think She Knows’ and ​‘Until the End of Time’ sees Tim­ber­lake sud­den­ly dis­ap­pear behind a gigan­tic piano only to then reap­pear sat at the key­board: with this De Pal­ma-esque fake split-diop­tre shot, Demme breaks down any sense of pro­por­tion to make of this stage an oth­er­world­ly space, where music and feel­ing have replaced the laws of physics as the basis for logic.

Dimen­sions fold into each oth­er to the sound of music, and Timberlake’s face as he sings pas­sion­ate­ly seems to come out of the screen, as if to sing just for us, or just for him­self, and in fact for an entire crowd. His inti­mate expe­ri­ence is also ours.