Though her debut album has yet to drop, Noni has already racked up several hits alongside her louche rapper boyfriend, Kid Culprit (Colson “Machine Gun Kelly” Baker), and all eyes are on her as she slinks through a hotel to her penthouse suite after an awards show. She winds up in second place, but is ordered to smash the offending trophy by her tart-tongued, council-flat stage mom (Minnie Driver), who asks, “Do you wanna be a runner-up, or do you want to be a winner?” Harsh, maybe, but it sure worked out well for Joe Jackson and Murry Wilson.įlash forward to the present day, and the adult Noni (Mbatha-Raw) has fashioned herself into a lubricious Rihanna-Katy Perry hybrid, perpetually decked out with stripper gear and a purple weave. Inauspiciously, the film begins with a prologue set in the late 1990s, as frizzy-haired British grade schooler Noni (India Jean-Jacques) delivers a beautiful a cappella rendition of Nina Simone’s “Blackbird” at a talent competition. 14 Relativity release could well be a sleeper. Yet writer-director Gina Prince-Bythewood (“Love and Basketball”) nonetheless manages to fit all the warring elements of her screenplay into an undeniably entertaining, attractive package, buoyed by a fierce lead performance from Gugu Mbatha-Raw as a burgeoning pop star, and Nate Parker as the cop who saves her from suicide. “ Beyond the Lights” is a strange beast, a music-industry romance that alternates freely between wisdom and mawkishness, caustic entertainment-biz critique and naive wish fulfillment, heartfelt flourishes and soap-opera shenanigans.
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