Whitney Houston biopic I Wanna Dance With Somebody a triumph

“I beat the Beatles. I beat Elvis.” So Whitney Houston (a powerhouse Naomi Ackie) tells the man who makes her records, Clive Davis (the ever-watchable Stanley Tucci), in I Wanna Dance With Somebody. And so she did.

Naomi Ackie in I Wanna Dance with Somebody

“I beat the Beatles. I beat Elvis.” So Whitney Houston (a powerhouse Naomi Ackie) tells the man who makes her records, Clive Davis (the ever-watchable Stanley Tucci), in I Wanna Dance With Somebody.

And so she did. This Hollywood biopic, directed by Kasi Lemmons, is not as good as Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis or Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back, but it is not that far from them.

At its centre is an extraordinary performance by the English actor Ackie, who is perhaps best known as rebel stormtrooper Jannah in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019).

She does not sing the songs – Whitney is dubbed over her – but she acts them (we do hear her breaths) with intense emotion and physicality. It looks and sounds like she is singing live.

The supporting cast is right on song. Tucci as the white male record producer, Ashton Sanders as Whitney’s messed-up singer-songwriter husband Bobby Brown, Nafessa Williams as her ex-lover, best friend and artistic director Robyn Crawford, Clarke Peters as her authoritarian father John and especially Tamara Tunie as her gospel singer mother Cissy.

The script is by Anthony McCarten, a biopic specialist with Oscar nominations for The Theory of Everything (2014) and The Two Popes (2019). The cinematographer, Barry Ackroyd, was nominated for an Oscar for The Hurt Locker (2008).

With this much talent at her disposal, it would be hard for the actor turned director to go wrong on what is only her fifth feature film, and she does not.

This is a compelling story, as in Luhrmann’s Elvis, of how a star can rise, fall and shatter. It’s about facing the contradictions of fame: wanting to sing, wanting to be heard in the broader sense and wanting to disappear from the relentless public view.

The use of Whitney’s hit songs is impressive. Unlike many musical biopics, the songs are not condensed to a two-hour highlights reel. We see and hear most of them in full, which partly explains the 144-minute run time.

It feels, at times, like being at a Whitney Houston concert, and that’s an atmosphere that can send tingles up the spine. At the same time, it looks beyond the songs.

The title song, I Wanna Dance With Somebody, is interspersed with off-stage shots that show Whitney’s rapid rise to fame, such as her partying on a yacht in the Mediterranean.

Even moments that should feel cliched – such as Whitney singing The Star Spangled Banner at the Superbowl as Top Gun-like jets soar ­overhead – do not. We are lifted high by Whitney’s voice, as was the crowd that day, and by Ackie’s acting. Also fascinating is Whitney, who was not a songwriter, choosing which songs to do. She and Davis sit in his office and listen to other people singing songs written for her.

She listens and says yes or no, and explains why. Interestingly, there is one song she rejects, because she sees no personal relevance in it, that she agrees to do later in life.

All of this is insightful and humorous, as is the moment where he hands her the script for what became 1992 film The Bodyguard and explains what the movie is about. Whether what she does and says in response (the bin and the star Kevin Costner are involved) is something only Davis can know, as Houston died in 2012, aged 48. He is a producer on this movie.

This is the fifth Whitney Houston movie made since her death, but the first one to have the approval of her estate. That does not mean it’s a hagiography.

It is a celebration of her too-short, spectacular career but it does not ignore her drug use, her sexual relationship with Crawford, her tempestuous marriage, and her concert disasters.

As Davis tells her at one point, she is on the cover of magazines such as People but “not for your music”.

“Every song is a story,’’ her mother says early on, when Houston is a back-up singer for Cissy’s band. “If it’s not a story, it’s not a song.”

I think she’s right about that, and this movie tells one hell of a story.