She denies who she is and keeps trying, and failing, to fill the void. Was Robyn Whitney Houston’s greatest love of all? The film answers that by dramatizing how the love that a homophobic society coerces Houston into repressing is at the heart of the traumas that come for her later. She keeps Robyn hanging around, as her creative director and closest comrade, but Whitney also has a conflicted traditional side. She complies, though in a complex way, shunting Robyn to the side and sleeping with men, like Jermaine Jackson (Jaison Hunter), whom she’s attracted to, all of which feeds her without fulfilling her. She is more or less forced, by the music industry and by her manipulative business-manager father (played by the superb Clarke Peters), to hide her relationship with Robyn. What you hear in Houston’s voice is indescribably infectious, but it’s really the sound of faith. Here, and in Whitney’s debut appearance two weeks later on “The Merv Griffin Show,” and in the extravagant way that she takes command in her videos and concert appearances, “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” channels the soaring gospel-meets-pop-meets-her-own-joyful-thing majesty that made Houston, arguably, the greatest female popular singer after the holy triumvirate of Aretha, Barbra, and Judy. Whitney, still coltishly unseasoned, steps out on stage and sings “The Greatest Love of All,” and it’s the first of many performance scenes that will give you chills. She’s discovered by the legendary Clive Davis ( Stanley Tucci, nailing the Arista mogul’s bone-dry dictator-mensch savoir faire) at Sweetwater’s, a New York nightclub where her protective and domineering mother, Cissy Houston (Tamara Tunie), is the headliner. The director, Kasi Lemmons (“Harriet”), working from a screenplay by Anthony McCarten (“Bohemian Rhapsody”), creates a portrait of Houston’s glories and demons that’s bracingly authentic, from her roots in the gospel church, where she can’t resist adding curlicues to the melodies, to the drugs she starts doing casually with her brothers in their middle-class community of East Orange, NJ, to her quick rise to fame to her love affair with Robyn Crawford (Nafessa Williams), a relationship that Houston feels no compulsion to hide until she becomes a star. Ackie is also a veritable artist of lip-syncing, bringing to life the drama of Houston’s songs, and doing it with a mischievous sparkle that was the essence of Whitney (and make no mistake: the decision to use Houston’s real voice throughout was the right one). She shows you the freedom that made Houston tick and the self-doubt that ate away at her, until she fell from the mountaintop she’d scaled. As Houston, the British actor Naomi Ackie is far from the singer’s physical double, yet she nails the hard part: channeling her incandescence.
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