Publication: Newsweek [US]
Date: July 23, 1984
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Title: "The New Prince of Hollywood"
Written By: David Ansen

As a rock star, he's outrageous but plausible. As a movie star, he's unprecedented. We're talking about Prince, the 24-year-old funk dandy with the Little Richard pompadour and the rude and lewd stage manner, the man whose haunting hit "When Doves Cry" defies all conventional wisdom about what a No. 1 single should be. The song is from his new album, already No. 3 on the charts. Next week, when Purple Rain (bold) opens across the country, that sound-track album will no doubt fly even higher, and Prince may find himself anointed as the screen's newest and most singular idol.

A part black, part Italian from Minneapolis, Prince is hardly cut from Hollywood cloth--which is why he insisted on making his film independently and stocking it with his home team of musicians and friends. But Prince has always done things differently. His smashingly danceable 1980 album, "Dirty Mind," inflamed his fans with the most sexually explicit lyrics in rock--few of which were allowed on the airwaves. On his apocalyptic double album, "1999," he proclaimed himself the low priest of libidinous liberation, singing a catechism of "dance music sex romance." Performing onstage in bikini underwear, women's stockings and an overcoat, mixing musical as well as sexual metaphors, he has confronted and crossed over the black-white stereotypes of '80s pop music in much the same way Jimi Hendrix broke the rules in the '60s. Who knows what effect he could have on movie mythology?

If you dissect "Purple Rain" down to its bare bones, it may sound old hat: a backstage musical with an alienated rock star, a beautiful girl he woos, loses and rewins, a rivalry with another band, a struggle for self-knowledge, a triumphant concert finale. The audience has been here before--but not in this company, and not with this music. Whatever shortcomings "Purple Rain" has--and it's far from a seamless movie--tend to be obliterated by the passion of Prince's music and by the surprising depth charges of emotion this semiautobiographical tale sets off.

Prince plays a rising Minneapolis star referred to only as the Kid. Though this is clearly a self-portrait, no attempt is made to make the Kid lovable: his colleagues justifiably accuse him of paranoia, selfishness and self-indulgence. He refuses, for example, to play the songs the two women in the band have written. (Until "Purple Rain," where he plays with the Revolution, Prince not only composed, performed and produced his albums, but played all the instruments on them.) But when the Kid rides his motorcycle home to his parents' house, we see the flip side of the arrogant and flamboyant performer: a traumatized, tremulous kid who must bear constant witness to domestic violence.

The Kid's father (Clarence Williams III), an embittered, ex-musician, takes out his rage on his wife (Olga Karlatos) and slaps the Kid around, too, when he tries to intervene. When the Kid falls for the beautiful Apollonia (Apollonia Kotero, the lead singer of Apollonia 6), he's forced to confront the fact that his father's brutality toward women has become part of his own psychic makeup. He slaps her (italics) when she announces that she's going to join the rival's group. This is turf that rock movies rarely tread: parents are usually just stick figures who shake their puzzled heads as their wild and crazy progeny pursue their rock-and-roll dreams. The screenplay, based on Prince's outline and written by Albert Magnoli and William Blinn, is drawn in fairly crude brush strokes, but there's real pain at the core.

Schizoid: The best acting in "Purple Rain" is by neither Prince nor Apollonia (who are stunning icons, but not quite actors yet) but by Morris Day, lead singer of The Time, who plays the Kid's preening, nefarious rival; his comic riffs are simply an extension of his jiving, zoot-suited, concert-stage persona. But director Magnoli savvily plays to the strengths of the two leads, who work up some real steam in one very hot love scene. With Prince there's an intriguingly schizoid rift between the on-and off-stage selves: an invulnerable exhibitionist before a crowd, he's moody and tentative and a bit passive when the music stops, and you sense how crucial it is to release his fantasies of sex and power and love in song. Creativity, in "Purple Rain," is both stopgap and salvation.

And it is onstage that Prince--and the movie--really burn. The exhilirating opening number, "Let's Go Crazy," with its Hendrix-like guitar riffs, could stand alone as a great MTV clip. Performing "The Beautiful Ones," Prince's eloquent falsetto slides from a plangent, Smoky Robinson croon to an electrifying James Brown screech. "I Would Die 4 U" has the irrestible velocity of the old Motown classics, and the climactic "Purple Rain" evokes a John Lennon anthem as it builds to its rousing psychedelified climax.

Prince's "Purple Rain" songs are wildly eclectic and yet wholly his own. When the boss at the club criticizes the Kid for dragging his personal neuroses onstage ("Your music makes sense to no one but yourself"), he couldn't be more wrong: these hothouse deliriums of lust and transcendence speak to anyone who converses in the primal parlance of rock and roll. Prince is one of a handful of performers who've restored urgency and danger--and the beat--to the rock scene. And "Purple Rain" gets that excitement on screen.