Blu-Ray Review: Made In America

By Brad Henderson

Made In America is a small documentary made by Ron Howard about a very diverse concert put together by Jay-Z. Pearl Jam, RUN DMC, Skrillex, and many more deliver a wonderful concert but a subpar documentary.

We are given about an hour and a half of this concert with only snippets of actual performances. There are also small, sporadic interviews with certain musicians but we never get the full story or emotion from them aside from Jay-Z, and even then the movie only breaches the surface. It feels like Ron Howard followed Jay-Z around for three days and made this documentary. I think that’s the most upsetting part about it. Made In America feels like it had loads of potential but it was just cut short for some reason.

By far the most screen time is spent with Jay-Z; we actually get to hear him speak and talk about his past and what inspired him to make music. To be honest, the documentary should been about him and they obviously had enough material in order to do so. I prefer concert movies or just straight documentaries, but here there is a mixture of both that doesn’t flow together at all. Brief interviews with musicians are alternated with about a minute of concert footage. Once we start getting into the song, it ends abruptly and jumps to something else completely, taking away the flow the film was creating.

I do love how they tried to include everyone involved with the festival, interviewing them as well. There are interviews with a food truck lady, backstage helpers, and even the smaller personnel, but not all of them are interesting enough to actually carry any portion of the film. Like I said, it is cool that they did it but there isn’t enough there to actually keep the ball rolling. Especially jumping from a performance to someone talking about rigging up lights. It just doesn’t mesh well at all.

Ron Howard does capture some remarkable footage but it is smothered by so much other mediocre hoopla we actually forget what we are watching. Sometimes it feels like a commercial and sometimes it feels like a personal interview but it fails to achieve the meaning that they were trying to get to: the music.

Made In America was released on Blu-Ray on July 22 from Phase 4 Films.