Honeydripper

This film works on so many levels. It celebrates life, song, diversity, and the birth of rock and roll. Honeydripper is simply one of John Sayles' best films. The structure allows for an ensemble cast, mostly black, with a couple of storylines that converge on a night of music at a backwoods gin joint in 1950s Georgia. Sayles has always had a way with words, with his best films examining the micro within the macro: think Eight Men Out or Matetwan. Really just insert your own favorite Sayles film because even his least seen, say The Secret of Roan Inish, are magic when compared with your typical movie du jour.
The Honeydripper Lounge will close unless its owner and piano player Danny Glover can come up with a miracle. In the rural cotton country where the Honeydripper stands the relation between black and white is tolerable if not cautious. Local sheriff Stacy Keach picks up a wandering musician who just happens to carry a homemade electric guitar with a prototype amp. The sheriff hands the man off to the judge as a vagrant and he's sentenced to work with pay on the judge's cotton farm. Oh yeah, if Glover's wife will make Keach some of her famous fried chicken a quiet truce will prevail in the county.
Naturally the film culminates with a show to end all shows at the Honeydripper. How the liquor is scammed, how the law is paid off and how about a dozen characters (everyone from Charles Dutton to Mary Steenburgen) resolve their various conflicts provides the grist for Sayles mill. The movie just unwinds in its own time zone and takes the viewer to a place you want to absorb completely.
By the way, Sayles also doctors a lot of studio films, his credit can be found on the current Spiderwick Chronicles. Sayles began the current wave of indie cinema with Return of the Secaucus Seven in 1980, a film he did everything on in the manner that Robert Rodriguez does on his films. He financed the film with money he made writing scripts for films like Alligator and Piranha. Whether Sayles is grinding out genre pulp or creating nuanced serious dramas his films stand the test of being cinematically engaging.
Don't fail to give Honeydripper some love as it was soundly ignored by the Indie Spirit Awards, the Oscars and everyone else. Honeydripper shares some resemblance to the Denzel Washington directed The Great Debaters. Both films take place within black communities in the era of Jim Crow in the South, and both were released late in the year. Honeydrippers is only playing in one theater locally, the downtown Angelika, but the experience is worth seeking. In fact you should be visibly stoked to see this movie - it unwinds so smoothly.