“Really, I just want to sing.” While she says this, Noni (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) is preparing to do pretty much anything but sing. A rising pop star, she’s surrounded by label executives and advertising experts, makeup artists and costumers, hangers-on and ever-desperate flunkies, and her mom. As the camera cuts from Noni to Macy Jean (Minnie Driver), their faces mirror each other, simultaneously determined and distracted, anxious and bored, alike and opposite.
The fraught relationship between mother and daughter turns increasingly vivid in Beyond the Lights. The melodrama begins with a first scene, set in 1998, when Macy Jean arrives at a South London salon just as it’s closing for the evening and insists that the black hairdresser help with ten-year-old Noni’s (India Jean-Jacques) unruly ‘do. Mom’s desperation wins out, the hair is tamed, and in the next scene, the little girl performs a heartbreaking version of Nina Simone’s “Blackbird” on stage at a local talent contest while mom watches. As lovely as sweet little Noni’s voice may be, as moved as the judges’ faces appear, the cutesy white girl tap dancer wins, with Noni first runner-up.
Cut to the parking lot, where Macy Jean curses the tap dancer and the judges, breaks the second place trophy, and vaguely terrorizes her child. Noni’s eyes well with tears as she stuffs herself into the back seat to await the cut ahead in time to another performance, now with dreadful purple hair and sensational skimpy outfit, alongside her cocky-skinny-white-faux-thug-rapper-boyfriend Kid Culprit (Richard Colson Baker). Macy Jean watches again, less hopeful than ferocious.
You might be relieved when Beyond the Lights pauses in its pathologizing of Macy Jean in order to take another formulaic plot detour into romance — but then you’re not. Here again, the dimensions are highly stylized: Noni’s unhappiness at her seeming success leads to a crisis and a rescue enacted by a protective and perfectly-chested police officer named Kaz (Nate Parker). Like Macy jean, he provides a mirror for Noni, in the sense he’s also feeling pressured by an ambitious parent (Danny Glover). Unlike Macy Jean, of course, his love for Noni will look much more unconditional (save for one or two conditions in the form of plot-prolonging misunderstandings).
With Kaz’s support — and that of his doting dog — Noni will go on to make increasingly right and righteous choices, turning away from the darkness of crude commercialism and toward the light of something more like singing, with occasional forays into contract law (including a rendition of India Arie’s “I Am Light”). The opposition is reductive, the metaphors are thick, and the moralizing framework provided by Kaz makes Beyond the Lights a little too reminiscent of The Bodyguard.
What’s lost in the movie’s inclination to formula is its intermittent focus on Macy Jean and Noni. The dynamic here is so full of complication and energy, so patently shaped by general ideas of race, class, and gender that you want to see more detail on screen. That early sketched-out moment of Macy Jean’s visit to the hair salon says so much and so little, her awkward effort to manage her daughter’s blackness, her almost-self-awareness concerning her own ignorance, and her confusions about love and desire.
By the time Macy Jean explains herself late in the movie, you already know her motivation. You know she’s been driven by poverty and confidence, naiveté and genius all at once, calculating and brutal. She doesn’t need to tell Noni the story of how she came to see her daughter’s voice as their ticket out. But still, the film provides it, as if this might justify Noni’s next several plot turns, not least being her emerging self-understanding as a young woman with talent and business savvy, art and strategy.
That this emergence coincides with a retreat to a Mexican beach and a return to her natural hair only reinforces the circular structure here, not only within the film’s own plot, but also within the broader framework of melodrama. The conventions in Gina Prince-Bythewood’s movie are fully functioning, not so much challenged as fine-tuned. As Noni makes peace with her own story, as she comes “home”, in her phrasing, the film also delivers what you might most expect, the camera circling the climactic embrace on stage, the crowd consuming, the image sold.