Music documentary covers a lot of familiar ground

Starring Bobby Bland, Mavis Staples, Snoop Dogg, and Terrence Howard. Directed by Martin Shore.

Rated PG for thematic material, language and smoking. Check listings for theaters. 1 hour, 30 minutes.

Bottm line: Comes off like a well-intentioned vanity project

By Roger Moore

McClatchy-Tribune

There have been earlier and better movies about “The Memphis Sound,” with the documentary “Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story” being among the best.

And there have been recent and better music documentaries built around the idea of giving music legends another recording session and a final moment in the sun — “Twenty Feet from Stardom” set the standard for those.

So “Take Me to the River,” a broader and shallower recreation of that magical era in rhythm & blues and soul, doesn’t cover new ground. The history isn’t extensively explored, which leaves us with the novelty of having a lot of rappers share studio time with the likes of Bobby Rush and William Bell, Mavis Staples and Bobby “Blue” Bland.

The rappers — from Lil P-Nut to Snoop Dogg — create new rap breaks for classic songs, which the legends sing and the rappers pitch in on — Snoop Dogg joining Bell for “I Forgot to Be Your Lover,” the late Bland wheeled in to cover “Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone” with the aid of rapper Yo Gotti.

It works, even when the film’s narrator, “Hustle & Flow” actor-who-once-played-a-singer Terrence Howard, who has real (guitar) musical chops, underwhelms with his singing voice on one number, and Bland plainly was 25 years past his prime.

Director and music producer Martin Shore stages these sessions in assorted historic Memphis studio spaces, or recreations of the places where Stax, America, Sun and Hi records were recorded in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, and the artists breaking out of there were Booker T. and the MGs’ (Booker plays on the first track), Isaac “Shaft” Hayes and others.

The musical smorgasbord includes white blues harmonica cat Charlie Musselwhite and Talking Heads R&B fan Jerry Harrison, sitting in, inventing, collaborating as they “make some noise and have fun while we’re doin’ it.”

The most valuable thing about the film, implied in the shared narration by Terrence Howard and director Martin Shore, is capturing these legends one more time before it’s too late. Bland has a lovely moment of teaching rapping savant Lil P-Nut how to properly sing a Ray Charles number, and guitarist Charlie “Skip” Pitts, who played on everything from “Duke of Earl” to Wilson Pickett records to the famous “wah wah” guitar of Hayes’ “Shaft,” gets his due. Both died before the film was released.

But the whole affair is more celebratory than organized — way too many scenes of people meeting and hugging — and comes off like a well-intentioned vanity project with a few too many vanities to serve.