'American Symphony' review: Joy, heartbreak mingle in this powerful documentary

WHAT IT'S ABOUT The documentary “American Symphony” follows the Grammy- and Oscar-winning musician Jon Batiste over the course of a transformative year.

It's 2022, the then-"Late Show with Stephen Colbert” band leader has been nominated for 11 Grammys and he's hard at work on bringing a yearslong symphony project to life. At the same time, his wife Suleika Jaouad, a bestselling author, faces a recurrence of leukemia that requires a bone-marrow transplant.

Filmmaker Matthew Heineman's work also includes "The First Wave," the 2021 documentary set at Long Island Jewish Medical Center about the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, he  gets what seems to be unfettered access and comes away with what feels like the movie version of Batiste's symphony, a work rife with the highs and lows, the joys and heartbreaks, the moments of beauty and cruel ironies that give life its meaning.

MY SAY "American Symphony” establishes this structure from the outset, when Jaouad observes that the same day Batiste received his 11 Grammy nominations, she started chemotherapy.

Later, when Batiste reaches his highest moment as a professional, winning the Grammy for Album of the Year for “We Are,” he returns home to New York and right to his wife's bedside, as she's hospitalized again.

The movie has the power it does because of the ways in which Heineman frames the particular journey of these two well-known people as being not all that dissimilar from the rest of us.

Much of that can be credited to Batiste and Jaouad allowing for their most intimate moments to be filmed, ranging from Batiste's therapy sessions to visits with cancer center doctors.

These make so much of what comprises the core of the picture tangible: The love that's there, as well as the stresses, the courage that's sometimes required just to find a reason to get up in the morning.

“We create music to communicate unspoken pain and joy,” Batiste says, and the scenes in which he and the ensemble pour everything into this symphony capture exactly what such a thing looks like, even if it can't be easily defined.

His goal with the piece is to tell a story that's as expansive and as meaningful as something titled "American Symphony" should be, showing the range of influences and inspirations that define an artist and strike back against our need to place them into neat categories.

But through precise, impressionistic editing and what clearly seems to have been a deep understanding of this subject, the movie shows that this symphony, which Batiste and his musicians eventually performed at Carnegie Hall, is also something else.

It's a conversation with his wife and with himself. It expresses something so fundamental about their love, including the fears that come with it; about the journey that's brought Batiste to this place; and about the need to create that drives him, that it can only be told exactly like this.

BOTTOM LINE It's not just for Batiste fans. There have been few better movies about the creative process.