Summer of Soul, review: a dazzling dive into the wild, groovy, volatile Sixties

• Dir: Ahmir Thompson. 12A cert, 117 mins

Between June and August 1969, a series of open-air concerts took place in Harlem, New York that were dubbed the “Black Woodstock”. In the dazzling, joyous and emotional new documentary, Summer of Soul, footage lost for over 50 years has been lovingly restored, cleverly recontextualised and audaciously edited into a fierce homage to American black music’s connections with the culture, community and politics of the civil rights era.

There’s an absolutely mind-blowing drum solo from a 19-year-old Stevie Wonder in the opening minutes, which acts as a thrilling taster for what lies in store. Debutant director Ahmir Thompson is better known as Questlove, the drummer and band-leader of the pioneering Philadelphia hip-hop band The Roots, who has established parallel careers as a producer, DJ, author and music journalist. Thompson’s musicality shines through in a fast, percussive and beautifully synchronised edit of Wonder’s high-energy playing with scene-setting images and sound bites that pack in narrative information without disrupting the rhythmic flow.

Originally billed as The Harlem Culture Festival, the shows took place over six weekends to audiences of nearly 300,000 locals – “a sea of black faces”, as a crowd member wonderingly recalls in one of many touching contemporary interviews judiciously incorporated with the historic footage. While the psychedelic soul band The Chambers Brothers dig into the bustling groove of Uptown, Questlove anchors their performance in a snappy historical précis.

Sharply-cut clips illustrate the forces that brought the black civil-rights movement to a boiling pitch, with the 1965 and 1968 assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, the police brutality of the 1968 inner-city riots, and the disproportionately high number of deaths of black American soldiers in the Vietnam War. “The goal of the festival,” a witness speculates, “may have been to keep black folks from burning up the city”.

Brilliantly programmed by a sharp-dressing hustler, Tony Lawrence, with the support of the racially sensitive Republican New York mayor, John Lindsay, the shows themselves centred on key strands of black American music, Motown, gospel, blues, soul, jazz and funk, with diversions into Cuban grooves and Afrobeat. We see glorious long-lost performances from such seminal figures as BB King, The Staples Singers, David Ruffin of the Temptations, Gladys Knight and the Pips, a blazing young Hugh Masakela, the imperious singer-songwriter Nina Simone and Sly and the Family Stone at the peak of their funky powers; these are worth the ticket price alone.

But the colourful audience might be the real stars here. They’re boldly decked out in the spectacular fashions of the era, where natty soul suits jostled with the colourful Afro stylings of funk, and they celebrate the vitality of their culture in scenes that move between joy, anger, sorrow, defiance, pride and stoic optimism about the future. Thompson’s brilliant compression of stories with musical numbers builds powerful narrative momentum. When a young Rev Jesse Jackson delivers an onstage speech about the last moments of King, accompanied by gospel legend Mahalia Jackson and youthful tyro Mavis Staples singing a spine-tingling ‘Take My Hand, Precious Lord’, the emotional impact is shattering.

The shows were professionally videotaped from multiple angles by freelance TV producer Hal Tulchin, but he couldn’t find a network willing to broadcast a black-themed concert, and 40 hours of footage gathered dust until his death in 2017. With this bold and imaginative restoration, Summer of Soul puts the marginalisation of black culture at the core of the story.

In the same summer, just a few hours’ drive north of Harlem, naked hippies would writhe to rock guitars in the mud of Woodstock, in an event that became a symbol of a generation, enshrined in Michael Wadleigh’s 1970 blockbuster documentary. Meanwhile, astronauts were walking on the Moon, a billion-dollar project treated with derision by a street-smart audience so brilliantly attired you could probably spot them from space. “White man’s going to the moon,” mocks one. “I’m going to Harlem to have me some fun.”

In cinemas from Friday and on Disney+ from July 30