American Symphony

On the day Jon Batiste receives eleven Grammy nominations, he learns that his wife Suleika Jaouad's leukaemia has returned. For a year the camera follows them both: he writes a symphony to be performed at Carnegie Hall, she goes through a bone marrow transplant. The film is not interested in a success story. It is interested in living two lives at once: an awards night and a hospital room follow one another, and the film does not set them against each other but lays one over the other. Batiste moving between rehearsal and hospital becomes its rhythm. The form is observational: handheld camera, no staged interviews, long silences. The music comes directly out of the process rather than being added later. Matthew Heineman directed. It premiered at Telluride in 2023 and was released on Netflix on 29 November 2023. The song from it, It Never Went Away, by Batiste and Dan Wilson, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song. Who it is for: viewers who like documentaries about musicians and films about living with illness. Who it is not for: anyone who questions the limits of privacy. The camera stays in the hospital room a very long time and some scenes are close enough to make you uncomfortable.