by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $15.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Jackie Shane
Intro:
... the music is sublime end to end.
Large swathes of Trans history have been lost to time. A combination of clandestine necessity at times and places where living that truth in the open put one’s life at risk, and men holding pens to dictate what is ‘worth’ keeping in the history books (and often burning the ones that filled in the gaps), has resulted in decades, even centuries, of beautiful reality being stuck to the charred borders of what is ‘allowed’ to be remembered.
There’s a difference between someone deciding that their own life is their own damn business, and others dictating that it shouldn’t be anyone’s.
Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story opens with rotoscoped animation showing the titular soul singer performing ‘Money (That’s What I Want)’. With little video footage existing of Jackie Shane, it initially comes across as awkward but necessary to tell the story… until the next scene, showing her extended family finding a whole treasure trove of documents, jewellery, and (most pointedly) multiple painted portraits. The filtered animation becomes more than just a visual necessity – an extrapolation of the film’s perspective on the subject: the art outlives the person, so the person is the art.
Tracing her origins on Tennessee’s Jefferson Street, to her relocation by circus train to Toronto, the story of Jackie’s come-up as a drummer-turned-singer is punctuated by recorded phone conversations with the woman herself from the last year of her life. Her candid reflections on growing up in the Jim Crow South, turning down television spots who wanted her but not ‘her’, and talking her way out of a mob shakedown, bring as much colour to the telling as those paint-stroke visuals, as well as adding to the notion that her existence, even removed from her art, is a work of art.
It also helps that the music is sublime end to end. The centrepiece is her hit song that gives the film its name, and even if the talking head interviews weren’t already building up just how vital that one moment was for Queer visibility, her performance through the rotoscoping exudes the daring confidence from all sides of the framing.
Once that chorus kicks in, and Jackie’s voice deepens ever-so-slightly, it echoes out into a similarly bracing moment from Tatiana’s iconic performance of ‘The Same Parts’ on Drag Race: All Stars. (Incidentally, fellow Drag Race alumnus Makayla Couture shows up here as one of the performers of Jackie’s writings).
Along with serving as a vehement insistence that Jackie’s story must not be forgotten, it also takes the time to get into how Jackie herself approached the limelight… or, rather, didn’t. As vocalised over the phone, her perspective on her (relatively) short-lived career is that she stuck around while still enjoying it, and then bowed out once it got too much.
She was here for a good time, not a long time, and the film ensures that the hours are still marked.
Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story has its production quirks, and its visual style may not be to everyone’s taste, but as a moment for a genuine talent to tell their own story, it is highly effective. The reverence shown by the production and its many hands is matched by how evident her talent is throughout, both as musician and as intimate raconteur.
