Daily Times

Timothy Scott Bogart’s biopic about his father is longer on poetic license than real drama. In “Spinning Gold,” a sketchy but adoring if not outright devotional biopic about Neil Bogart, the upstart ’70s music-industry mogul who founded Casablanca Records, there’s a pivotal moment that spins around the story of how Bogart, at a party he was throwing, played the 3-minute-and-20-second single version of Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby.” He played it over and over again because his guests kept asking for it. That’s when the lightbulb went on. Bogart realized that the song needed to be longer, much longer – long enough to have sex to. This is a rather famous anecdote (in the new documentary “Love to Love You, Donna Summer,” which just premiered at SXSW, there’s a clip of Bogart telling it on a talk show). So we assume that we’re going to see Bogart meet with Giorgio Moroder, the song’s composer and producer and change music history.

It happens that way…sort of. Bogart tells Moroder that he wants a longer version of the song. But then Bogart himself, in Munich, meets with Donna Summer and presides over a recording session in which the song gets remade. Bogart keeps telling Summer that the song needs something extra, and he gets her to start mixing orgasmic moans into the vocals by nuzzling up against her, whispering in her ear and seducing her into an erotic trance.

Bogart, in his chipmunk way, was a curly-haired nerd, but Jeremy Jordan, the Broadway actor who plays him, is suave and willowy, like Chris Pine’s little brother. This scene, which never actually happened, is a touch ridiculous, because “Love to Love You Baby” already had that something extra (that’s why the people at Bogart’s party wanted him to keep playing it), and also because the movie comes close to saying that Bogart was the song’s actual lover-man auteur. The attitude of “Spinning Gold” seems to be: What’s wrong with a little poetic license if it adds to the Bogart luster?

What’s wrong what it is that the truth would have been more interesting. “Spinning Gold” was written and directed by Timothy Scott Bogart, who is Neil Bogart’s eldest son and he takes a lot of poetic license. He shouldn’t have, because the film knows that what it’s telling is fundamentally a business story – the saga of how Bogart, a postman’s son from Brooklyn, founded the most successful independent music label of all time, and brought it off because he had the audacity, the gambler’s recklessness, the Jewish outsider’s go-for-broke moxie and the taste for what was ahead of the curve to bet everything on the artists he believed in, even when their record sales were telling him he’d made a bad bet. Bogart had an awesome faith in his artists, notably Kiss, the band that turned heavy metal into a down-and-dirty spectacle of lusty carnival teenage fantasy, and Donna Summer, whose ecstatic virtuosity fueled the disco revolution. Summer’s moans and Gene Simmons’ tongue were arguably the two most lewd pop-music artifacts of the 1970s and though they represented vastly different musical forms, what bound them together, according to the movie, was that Bogart was himself enough of a wild man to embrace the unprecedented hormonal musical surge of it all.

But it took a few years for the world to catch up to those artists. The short version of “Love to Love You Baby” wasn’t a success; it tanked. And Kiss, a band that drove its adolescent fans wild in arenas, couldn’t translate the concert frenzy into album sales. The movie keeps flashing, onscreen, how much debt Bogart gets himself into, launching his company like a castle in the air. After the company is cut loose from Warner Bros., the debt piles up from four to five to six million, which was a lot of money in the mid-’70s.

We go into “Spinning Gold” expecting a Casablanca Records docudrama to be a whirlwind tale of success and excess. The excess is there, at least in token form, when Bogart dips into a vial of cocaine given to him at a party by the newly signed George Clinton (Wiz Khalifa), who asks for a million dollars (which he spends on tour buses, custom cars for the band members, and an onstage spaceship). About five minutes later, Bogart is spreading the drugs out on his office table, so that even his deadbeat of a father screams at him, “What’s a matta wit you?” before lowering his voice to deliver that coup de grâce of clichés, “You’ve lost the music, kiddo.” The success? That takes longer to come.

There’s the biopic as actual drama. There’s the biopic as glorified Wikipedia entry. And then there’s the biopic as Wikipedia entry where you look up the Wikipedia entry and see that it is, in fact, more accurate – a better biopic – than the movie. “Spinning Gold” falls into that latter category. Did Neil Bogart really sit down at the piano with Gladys Knight (Ledisi), just after he’d poached her from Motown, and help her tweak “Midnight Train to Houston” into the hook-laden pop cruise that was “Midnight Train to Georgia?” And after Bogart signed Bill Withers, did Berry Gordy really send around a posse of hoods to threaten Bogart with guns?

“Spinning Gold” is a movie in which it’s often hard to separate the TV-movie shorthand from the hagiographic embellishment. The film opens with a scene that makes us think, “Come on, that could never have happened!” It’s Bogart in 1967, when he was 24, dancing into a gospel church with his briefcase to make a deal for Buddha Records to release “Oh Happy Day,” the song that would become the first gospel-pop crossover single. Then Bogart, who narrates the film, tells us that it didn’t happen that way. The movie is playfully warning us how much the music industry prints the legend instead of the truth. But the cleverness of the gambit undercuts itself. Going forward, we can’t entirely trust anything we’re seeing, and the fact that Bogart stages the movie in a plainly lit, jumpy discursive way makes us trust it even less.

Yet for all the cut corners and dramatic hyperbole, Bogart does at least honor his father by capturing how his spirit of fast-and-loose ebullient imprudence played out in business terms. Jeremy Jordan may bring more of an “I’m too sexy” aura to the role than it called for, but he’s a good actor who nails Bogart’s manipulative savoir faire and his hyper-intelligent brashness. There are compelling scenes like the ongoing and rather hostile negotiations between Bogart and the members of Kiss, notably Gene Simmons (Casey Likes), born Chaim Witz in Israel, whom Bogart felt a kinship with for that reason.

The film is awfully forgiving about how Bogart flits back and forth between his wife, Beth and Joyce Biawitz (Lyndsy Foncesca), the manager of Kiss, who becomes his mistress, and with whom he has dialogue like this: “I get that you like to gamble. But what if Joey was right? In the end, what if the house does always win?” Neil: “Well, then we raise the stakes so high that we become the house!” There’s a romantically facile pie-in-the-sky quality to “Spinning Gold.” The movie actually made me miss the triple-scoop sleaze of the Scorsese/Terence Winter HBO ’70s record-industry drama “Vinyl” (which, back in 2016, seemed at least one
scoop too many). Timothy Scott Bogart wants to do justice to his father’s story and legacy, but the movie simply isn’t accomplished enough to bring that off. But it does, at least, make you see the funky splendor of his dream.