‘Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius)’ Review: Questlove’s Admiring Portrait Gives Sly Stone His Flowers

There’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment in Summer of Soul, Questlove’s rousing documentary about the Harlem Cultural Festival, when Sly Stone turns away from the microphone to look at his bandmates. It’s the late 60s and Sly & the Family Stone are performing their hit “Everyday People” to an enthused, multigenerational crowd. Attendees sway and clap, so attentive that they seem possessed. But there’s something particularly special about the way Sly spins around, faces his bandmates and starts dancing to their music. It’s as if they — the seven members of this dazzling funk group — are the only ones in the park and Sly, an exceptional artist tortured by fame’s unruly demands, can do anything. 

That scene gains greater resonance after watching Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius), Questlove’s admiring portrait of a generational talent. The doc, which like Summer of Soul premiered at Sundance, doesn’t revisit the Harlem concerts, but it underscores a tender, life-affirming intimacy between the members of Sly & the Family Stone. It also shows, perhaps unintentionally, that this makeshift family was a balm for its multi-hyphenate lead. As with many Black artists catapulted to meteoric heights of fame, Stone struggled to cope with what his popularity demanded. And yet, as scenes in Sly Lives! reveal, the musician never seemed more at ease than when jamming with his family — and for a while that kept him afloat.

In Sly Lives! Questlove sets out to understand the tensions faced by Black geniuses, artists who always seem ahead of the curve and whose talents defy comprehension. He uses Stone — a person whom the award winning DJ and producer has long admired — to illustrate a broader thesis about what the United States wants from Black celebrities, and what happens when those expectations aren’t met. Depending on the audience, these questions won’t yield revelatory answers. But the journey they take Questlove on — and what they allow the director to uncover about Stone, his band, their music and legacy — makes the doc worth watching when it streams on Hulu next month. 

Collaborating again with Summer of Soul editor Joshua L. Pearson, Questlove shapes an engaging narrative that charts Stone’s undulating career. The director interviews a host of people, from some of the original members of Sly & the Family Stone and Stone’s children to music executives and artists like D’Angelo, André 3000, George Clinton, Ruth Copeland and Chaka Khan. He culls old interviews, some licensed from Greg Zola’s Small Talk About Sly and Michael Rubenstone’s On The Sly: In Search of the Family Stone, and intersperses them with infamous television appearances, concert footage and audio from studio sessions.

And unlike many other music doc projects, Questlove’s film doesn’t shy away from the more complicated parts of Stone’s legacy: He covers the artist’s substance abuse, the period in which Stone bailed on his responsibilities and the vengeful media coverage of these troubling times. Questlove doesn’t interview Stone for the doc (although the director published and wrote the forward for the musician’s 2023 memoir Thank You [Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin]), and without his voice the resulting project functions more like a tender and sobering love letter. It gathers Stone’s community to reflect on his genius and gives the artist, who wrestled with anxiety, substance abuse, and spiritual unease, his flowers. 

Born Sylvester Stewart, Stone was raised in Vallejo, California. His parents were a part of the Great Migration, that wave of African-Americans who trekked from Southern enclaves to Northern cities, and moved to Vallejo when the artist was less than a year old. He found music through the church. Stone played the guitar, bass and drums roughly six to seven times a week at different church events: Sunday service, Thursday night prayer, Usher Board meetings, etc. Elements of Stone’s later music — the harmonies, beats and even the themes — evoke the same energy as revivals. He also sang in the choir, which is where Cynthia Robinson, who later played the trumpet in the Family Stone, first saw him. His singing, she says early in the doc, “was on another level, that caused joy in your heart.” 

Stone consistently operated on another level. After a brief stint in college, he dropped out and made a living as a DJ and producer in San Francisco. (Naturally, he excelled at both.) It wasn’t until the late 60s, when Stone formed Sly & the Family Stone with saxophonist Jerry Martini, that the artist found a home for all of his talent. The pair recruited their friends and hardly considered, at least in the beginning, the novelty of their mixed-race, multi-gender coterie. 

Questlove excitedly devotes significant chunks of Sly Lives! to the musician as an artist. With the help of participants like Mark Anthony Neal, Nile Rodgers and Terry Lewis, among others, the director breaks down some of the band’s most iconic tunes. Some of the most thrilling parts of the doc include different takes of the songs that would become “Everyday People” and “Stand” and explain the degree to which other artists were influenced by Stone. (A particularly gratifying scene explains Stone influenced Janet Jackson’s song “Rhythm Nation.”)

Part of what made Summer of Soul so excellent (and a difficult act to follow) was the combination of incredible archival footage with crisp editing that translated the mood and atmosphere of this under-explored slice of history. In Sly Lives! Questlove and Pearson experiment with frenzied editing that mimics Stone’s own style, but the documentary, by virtue of its structure, is comparatively more straightforward.

There’s also a strength to the musical-exposition parts of Sly Lives! that make the big-ideas parts of the doc pale in comparison. It’s not that Questlove’s theory doesn’t have legs — there are numerous examples of how popular Black artists are later cruelly vilified — but these sections feel more searching, and as a result too broad for the project’s scope. How Black artists are treated by the mainstream press and how they aren’t afforded the same creative expression as white artists are hefty enough subjects to warrant their own documentaries. In Sly Lives! these themes vie for time with the titular subject, and it’s hardly a fair competition.