Every once in a while, you hear a song that really speaks to you. It touches you and it moves you personally. I feel that experience is more common with music but occasionally that experience happens with a movie. Baadassss! is that kind of movie for me. I see a lot of movies (a lot). Normally, I see them and either I like them or I don’t. I really liked this movie but more than that, it spoke to me on a personal level so it’s a little bit more difficult to be objective.

For those who do not know, Baadassss! is Mario Van Peebles attempt to chronicle the making of his father’s classic film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song. Released in 1971, Sweetback became the highest grossing independent film of the year (beating out the wildly popular and super sappy Love Story). Sweetback was the prototype for many of the Black movies that followed: Shaft, Superfly, and Cleopatra Jones to name a few. Until Sweetback, blacks were consistently relegated stereotypical or comedic roles (with the notable exceptions of Diahann Carroll in Julia, Bill Cosby in I Spy and Sidney Poitier in just about everything he did). Sweetback was the first film to show a black hero taking on the white villians and living to tell. It was, in a word, revolutionary.

Mario Van Peebles was a boy of 13 when his father set out to make Sweetback. The subtitle is “a love story” and it is. It is just as much a story of a father and a son as it is a slice of black cinematic history. Mario was with his father through much of the making of his film and even played several roles within it.

Van Peebles does an excellent job of showing the environment that Melvin was working in. In an era of civil rights, assassinations, war and protest, Hollywood was content to relegate blacks to comedic films and comic foils. When it became clear that the studio systems wouldn’t back a film where a black man took on corrupt white cops, Melvin took matters into his own hands. He financed the flick himself.

The cast is first-rate. Mario, in addition to directing, plays his father. Khleo Thomas as the young Mario, Ossie Davis as Melvin’s father, Rainn Wilson as Melvin’s hippie friend/producer Bill and Joy Bryant as Priscilla Melvin’s always auditioning secretary are standouts in a very solid cast. T.K Carter does a great imitation of Bill Cosby. And Khalil Khan shows up as a very youthful Maurice White.

Van Peebles the Younger uses actors to tell his father’s true story but the best part of the film takes place while the credits roll, as the real participants talk about their roles in this classic film.

Baadasssss! is at once motivating, entertaining and educational. It’s an independent film so it will be in a fraction of the theatres showing Soul Plane. Ironically, it’s the struggle that Melvin and others went through that make a Soul Plane possible.