Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues

Though the director Sacha Jenkins’s biographical portrait of Louis Armstrong is blandly conventional in its form, its wide-ranging material is inspiring and illuminating. The movie intercuts film and audio clips of Armstrong in performance and discussion, archival photographs, interviews with bandmates and current musicians (principally, Wynton Marsalis), and—above all—selections from Armstrong’s homemade reel-to-reel tapes, featuring both his solitary musings and his conversations with friends and associates. The film follows Armstrong’s path from his childhood, in New Orleans, to the discovery of his talent, his musical accomplishments in the gang-riddled night spots of Chicago and New York, and his rise to celebrity amid the casual cruelty experienced on concert tours in the Jim Crow South. Jenkins emphasizes Armstrong’s confrontation with American racism, whether in private—speaking with derisive profanity—or on television, dispensing plain truths about Black American life. The climax of the drama is Armstrong’s daring public rebuke, in 1957, to the federal government when it failed to enforce school desegregation; the musical highlight is a filmed performance of “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue” that distills historical tragedy into two minutes of scathing indignation. (In theatrical release and streaming on Apple TV+.)