Review: Richard Pryor’s ‘Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling’ on Criterion 4K UHD Blu-ray

As in his stand-up, Pryor deftly mixes humor and tragedy throughout the film.

Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is CallingWith its fractured narrative, complete with a gimmicky spectral figure guiding us through the proceedings, Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling is Richard Pryor’s All That Jazz. Playing like a greatest hits collection of Pryor’s stand-up routines, it begins with the titular character freebasing his way into a hospital burn unit, features him pulling a starter pistol on the mafia, and shows him destroying his wife’s car when she threatens to leave him.

Jo Jo Dancer’s profession mirrors Pryor’s own, as does his backstory: The film was shot in Peoria, Illinois, Pryor’s hometown and the location of the brothel where both he and Jo Jo grew up. Columbia Pictures wouldn’t grant Bob Fosse’s wish to play All That Jazz’s Joe Gideon, but they let Pryor play himself, or “himself” as it were, creating a meta experience before meta was cool.

After directing the stand-up comedy concert film Richard Pryor: Here and Now, Pryor and Paul Mooney teamed up with Rocco Urbisci to write a biographical film about a destructive stand-up comedian and give Pryor the chance to play dramatic scenes of great pathos and emotions, something that Hollywood rarely allowed him to do. As a filmmaker, Pryor makes rookie mistakes but excels at portraying things that he knows well. For one, he shoots a coke-fueled party with a strikingly frenetic energy, visually propelling the narrative forward with minimal dialogue. The film’s first scene, which sees Pryor’s character crawling around looking for freebase to smoke, reeks of a desperation that’s honest and haunting.

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Pryor plays not only the lead but the aforementioned spectral figure. This alter ego of Jo Jo more or less serves the same purpose as Jessica Lange’s Angel of Death from All That Jazz by walking Jo Jo back through events in his life that led him to his near-death state, but it also goes one step further by trying to convince our main character that his fucked-up life is salvageable. The alter ego is first seen pulling himself from Jo Jo’s smoldering body post-freebase accident, walking out of the hospital and into traffic stark naked. At first it seems that the alter ego is the film’s source of comic relief, but his true purpose is revealed when Jo Jo Dancer solves its opening scene’s mystery of how its protagonist wound up in that hospital.

As in his stand-up, Pryor deftly mixes humor and tragedy, subtly tweaking familiar tales from his routines, including the mafia skit from the 1982 stand-up comedy film Live on the Sunset Strip. The results are far more harrowing when played out by Pryor and his actors; subtracted from Pryor’s verbal delivery, the comedic focus sort of switches places with the trauma of the actual events. Hearing Pryor tell you the story of him in the hospital burnt to a crisp, comparing himself to fried chicken, is funny and terrifying. Seeing Pryor burnt to a crisp, with doctors working on him in a well-edited and shot sequence, is just terrifying.

Pryor swore that Jo Jo Dancer wasn’t autobiographical, but you’ll have trouble believing that, especially during the film’s most disturbing sequence, in which Jo Jo’s alter ego tries to talk Jo Jo off of drugs and out of his current situation. This scene takes place in the same space as the film’s opening, but we now see that the fire was no accident. As the later ego looks on, Jo Jo douses himself in alcohol and sets himself ablaze. The visual representation of this scene is profoundly upsetting. It’s as if Pryor, as his alter ego, is attempting to stop himself, as Jo Jo, from self-destruction. Yet he’s helpless. (Pryor’s daughter’s revelation that his freebasing accident was actually a suicide attempt only intensifies the horror of the sequence.)

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The film ends with Jo Jo’s comeback stand-up concert, a scene that would be dramatically lacking if we didn’t remember that Pryor’s own comeback was Live on the Sunset Strip. It’s disappointing that Pryor never directed another feature after this one, but we should count ourselves lucky that this film, despite its flaws, exists in the first place. Pryor’s true genius wasn’t just that he held a mirror up to his tragedies. He also said to us, “Go ahead, laugh! It may help you forget that you’re fucked up too.” Making Jo Jo Dancer must have felt that way for Pryor.

Image/Sound

A 2002 Mill Creek DVD was the film’s only North American home video release on disc preceding this one, meaning the film has been in dire need of refurbishing for decades. Thankfully, Criterion’s UHD presentation of a 2023 4K restoration by Sony punches up the colors of John A. Alonzo’s cinematography in vibrant and inviting ways, as in the gritty neon reds of nightclubs, while black levels are deep and free of crush. The disc comes with a 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio track that’s impressive for the way the dialogue is mixed high, but not too high, in the front, while the Herbie Hancock score and songs (by Chaka Khan, Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, and more) resound with clarity and force throughout.

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Extras

A new interview on the film with filmmaker Robert Townsend sheds light on “Richard Pryor’s fearless spirit,” their days at the Comedy Store in L.A. in the early 1980s, and Alonzo’s collaboration with Pryor on the look of the film. An archival episode of The Dick Cavett Show from 1985 features Pryor discussing the film’s creation, how his race colored his experiences in Hollywood, and more. Given Cavett’s often insufferably misguided line of questioning, the interview is more awkward than insightful, though it does reinforce the gulf that existed between Pryor’s intelligence and work ethic and those struggling to comprehend it at the time. Finally, a booklet contains an “appreciation” of the film by critic Hilton Als, which has some intriguing claims in it, such as Pryor being “one of the last great artist-martyrs, a man who saw no separation between his body and the world that battered it, licked it, coddled it, and at times ignored his genius entirely because its existence was too much.”

Overall

Richard Pryor’s film was largely dismissed by critics and audiences upon its release, but this release by the Criterion Collection should be enough to begin repairing its reputation.

Score: 
 Cast: Richard Pryor, Debbie Allen, Art Evans, Fay Hauser, Barbara Williams, Carmen McRae, Paula Kelly, Diahnne Abbott, Scoey Mitchell, Billy Eckstine, Tanya Boyd, Wings Hauser, J.J. Bary, E’Lon Cox  Director: Richard Pryor  Screenwriter: Rocco Urbisci, Paul Mooney, Richard Pryor  Distributor: The Criterion Collection  Running Time: 114 min  Rating: R  Year: 1986  Release Date: January 14, 2025  Buy: Video

Odie Henderson

Odie Henderson is The Boston Globe's film critic. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, Vulture, Cineaste, Salon, and RogerEbert.com.

Clayton Dillard

Clayton Dillard is a lecturer in cinema at San Francisco State University.

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