Director Liesl Tommy, using a screenplay by Tracey Scott Wilson, offers a series of chronological vignettes to try to explain what fed Franklin, a preacher's daughter from Detroit who would light up the world with her voice.
“Music will save your life,” is the Hallmark-like slogan used in the film — uttered by a soulful Tituss Burgess as the Reverend James Cleveland.
But that's not hefty enough to explain how a woman who endured rape, domestic violence, racism, misogyny, mental health challenges and addiction could go on to win 18 Grammys.
Music will save your life? That may work for Nickelodeon. You need more here.
The script by Tracey Scott Wilson (Fosse/Verdon) is a collection of scenes that don't add up to much, never really building and interrupted with overly long music sequences.
This film needed someone to sharpen and clarify. It needed what Franklin was, an ideal interpreter.
Even Tommy herself seems to get a little bored by the end when she starts fussing with black-and-white film and old lenses, recreating TV interviews and even mixing in real news footage from the '60s.
She even pops up in her own movie — as a fan seeking reassurance from Franklin — like a fangirl Alfred Hitchcock.
It is telling that many of the smaller roles pop more than the main event.
Mary J Blige, as a tempestuous, table-tossing Dinah Washington, gives the film an electric kick and Audra McDonald as Franklin's mother is precious and understated, every second of their screen time leaving you begging for more.
At age six, Franklin endured the separation of her mother — never explicitly said in the film because her dad was sleeping around — and then her mum's death at 10.
The film's first half hour dwells on these twin calamities, featuring Skye Dakota Turner as a terrific young Aretha and Forest Whitaker as her father, a complex role that mixes warmth and anger but never quite illuminates.
Franklin, who died in 2018, was raped and impregnated as a pre-teen, hit by her father and then hit again by her first husband (a fabulous, equal parts smouldering and vicious, Marlon Wayans.)
The queen was both a civil rights icon — standing with the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr — and a diva-ish drunk who lashed out at friends.
Hudson isn't afraid to get ugly at rock bottom, although maybe not as harrowing as Andra Day did as Lady Day in The United States vs Billie Holiday.
Respect doesn't dwell in the darkest depths like that biopic of another troubled superstar singer.
This film, unsurprisingly, is strongest whenever the music takes over, especially when Hudson opens her mouth and musical sparks fly or when we are shown Franklin feeling for her own sound, which we are reminded didn't happen for several albums.
A sequence in an Alabama recording studio when she and her band are creating “I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Love You)” is tense and excellent, as is when she stumbles into reworking Otis Redding's “Respect” around a piano with her sisters in their pyjamas.
The film ends with Franklin at 29 recording her landmark album “Amazing Grace”, and another 360-degree camera turn around her face. Alas, the film itself has grace but is not really amazing at all.
Respect, a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures is rated M for mature thematic content, strong language including racial epithets, violence, suggestive material and smoking. Running time: 144 minutes. Two stars out of four.
