Critics reviews

It is a performance that stages a Black Power call-and-response moment to ring in the "Black is Beautiful" era, and under Liz Garbus's sharp direction, the footage is framed by archival interviews of the artist articulating the crisis of a people robbed of their history... Garbus is a sophisticated storyteller and her Academy Award–nominated documentary uses performances, in part, to construct a compelling narrative about the artist who would come to be known as The High Priestess of Soul.

In 1968, an interviewer asked Nina Simone what freedom meant to her. "It's just a feeling," she replied, seemingly flustered by the question. Then, suddenly, an answer occurred to her. "I'll tell you what freedom is to me: no fear. I mean really, no fear!" This exchange appears early in Liz Garbus's remarkable documentary, What Happened, Miss Simone?, and it's a startling moment, for if Simone conveyed anything on stage, it was fearlessness.

This Liz Garbus-directed documentary on the life of Nina Simone is a powerful and honest piece of work, very difficult at times to take (such intensity, such sadness), with *incredible* live footage of Nina Simone performing (some of it never before seen seen), as well as clips of interviews with Simone, throughout her life.

[The concert "Nina Simone, Love Sorceress... Forever"] presents Simone's brilliance and instability as of a sad, strange, exhilarating piece. (At one point, she searches the mostly white audience for David Bowie.) This is both theater and therapy. What Garbus does is complicate a concert like that with grim clarifying details.

With such an electrifying intro, it's all the more disappointing to watch the film fall into Behind the Music conventionality, employing a perfunctory alternation of talking heads and archival material despite the fact that so much once-rare footage can now be seen on YouTube.

Rifling exhaustively through public and private archives, Garbus fashions a necessarily complex student of a woman who remained elusive even through her most candid art. She needn't work as hard to remind us of Simone's intensity as a performer, though there's plenty of that, too, in this riveting portrait.

An often electric, bracingly urgent documentary on the singer-musician Nina Simone... Like a lot of documentarians, Ms. Garbus lets her choices speak for her, and she occasionally errs, both in some of her sight-and-sound juxtapositions and by folding in too much of Simone's ex-husband, Andrew Stroud, who tends to run down his wife and her politics.

What Happened, Miss Simone? should at least thoroughly address the question posed by its title, but Garbus neglects to, instead blankly charting Simone's insistence that she supports an "any means necessary" approach to liberation, in tandem with civil rights leader Stokely Carmichael. Simone's political ideals are offered as such—that is, idealistically, as if her cultural significance is a given end, rather than one that needs to be reached retroactively.

Despite its straightforward, birth-to-death chronology and heavy reliance on a conventional mixture of talking heads and archival footage, What Happened, Miss Simone? pulses with its subject's abundant life force, often running clips of her performances long enough to include whole songs or lingering on close-ups of her majestic, expressive face, a Yoruba carving come to life, as she holds one of her intense, even intimidating silences in concert.

Garbus's Nina Simone bio-doc, while compelling and replete with memorable anecdotes, is an ultraconventional documentary destined for imminent cable broadcast.

Liz Garbus' What Happened, Miss Simone?, a portrait of singer/activist/force of nature Nina Simone, may not be on the level of [Searching for Sugar Man or Twenty Feet from Stardom], but damned if it doesn't lay out the life story of "the high priestess of soul" in broad, clips-bountiful strokes.

Especially in its first hour, where the archival footage is at its richest and most varied, the movie envelops you in a beautifully edited rush of Simone — recounting her lonely, somewhat ostracized childhood, making her debut at the Newport Jazz Festival, explaining what it means to her to be "free" onstage. Garbus is particularly sharp and unsentimental on the subject of Simone's complex, co-dependent relationship with Andrew Stroud...