‘Purple Rain’ at 40: TKTK Prince Made His Mark on the Movie Musical with ‘Purple Rain’

1984 was a strange time for American movie musicals. They weren’t exactly extinct; for the third year in a row, the Oscars found enough nominees to present an award for Original Song Score (basically, best lineup of songs, rather than sole Original Song or Original Score). Yet at the same time, the genre had been transformed by a more realism-focused 1970s, a more spectacle-driven 1980s, and a belated embrace of pop music. As a result, the summer of ’84 came alive with movie music, but only the Muppets were really holding it down for traditional showtunes (in The Muppets Take Manhattan, consciously a throwback to old-timey showbiz musicals). Elsewhere, you had Dolly Parton, who might have been a consistent musical movie star in previous generations, teaming up with Sylvester Stallone in Rhinestone; dance musicals like the summer mini-sensation Breakin’ and the still-playing Footloose; and bizarre attempts to embody the spirit of rock and roll like future cult object Streets of Fire.

The biggest musical of the year landed in (or close to) that last category when it emerged in July 1984: Purple Rain, a hybrid of backstage musical, concert movie, and premature biography featuring pop genius Prince – and winner of that year’s Original Song Score Oscar, handily beating the Muppets. 40 years later, Purple Rain feels both singular and influential. Perhaps most notably, it also feels like a creative evolution of the movie musical, even if not many subsequent projects followed in those particular footsteps.

Praising Purple Rain for its cinematic bona fides isn’t meant to boost director, co-writer, and co-editor Albert Magnoli at Prince’s expense. It’s just that, despite his multiple starring roles, Prince exists outside of the film world, as does the soundtrack album Purple Rain, its own ambitious undertaking packed with signature Prince bangers. “Let’s Go Crazy,” “Darling Nikki,” and the title track all appear in the movie – performed more or less in full! – but it’s entirely possible to formulate a relationship with the album and its hits without knowing much of anything about the movie, or Prince’s truly bizarre screen presence.

The character Prince sort-of plays in Purple Rain seems to be based closely on himself, though it’s not a flattering self-portrait. It’s also difficult to discern how self-critical it’s intended to be; you’d expect that someone of Prince’s artistry would probably be aware that the mercurial music performer, fronting at in-house band at real-life Minneapolis rock club First Avenue, comes across as variously petulant, moody, stubborn, misogynistic, and even abusive. The nature of the misogyny in Purple Rain has been debated; it’s too prevalent to feel like a simple product of the times, and the women of Prince’s various creative partnerships – Apollonia Kotero, Wendy Melvoin, Lisa Coleman – get plenty of screen time to air their grievances. Yet the movie doesn’t offer a whole lot of insight about these dynamics, either. It’s less an issue of depiction not equaling endorsement than the underwritten simplicity of the depiction itself, Prince’s character clearly inheriting the abuse he witnesses his father (Clarence Williams III) dish out to his mother (Olga Karlatos).

That plot point underlines one of many ways that Prince assigns himself a childlike bearing throughout the movie. Though he was in his mid-twenties when he made the film, his character is referred to only as The Kid. He seems to live at home, despite a steady gig as a musician, owning a nice-looking motorcycle, and a proclivity for barn sex, all of which indicate he might be ready for his own place. Generally, he speaks and acts with the countenance of a 15-year-old, whether going wide-eyed and soft spoken, working himself into a snit, or engaging in playground-level flirtations with Apollonia, an aspiring singer he kinda-sorta mentors. Truthfully, The Kid doesn’t seem particularly equipped to mentor anyone, and while the movie does seem to understand this, it also has kind of a watery, sometimes downright mystifying relationship to the creative process in general. (Which songs are supposed to electrify the First Avenue crowd, and why, is neither articulated or illustrated, a bigger problem decades later when most of them just sound like Prince classics.)

Some of these narrative and characterization problems can probably be laid at the feet of Magnoli, who did not go on to a particularly prolific career (especially once you eliminate the various Prince music videos from his filmography). On a technical level, though, Magnoli really delivers, because Purple Rain is often stunningly gorgeous in its look and its technique. The movie-opening performance of “Let’s Go Crazy” doesn’t just glow with stylized rock-club colors; Magnoli also edits in bits of character-introducing montage, with a rhythm just off-kilter and unannounced to keep the audience on their toes. Throughout the movie, he and Prince seem to yearn to escape the confines of narrative cinema, whether by merging the performances with the movie’s drama, refusing to cut away from the former to indulge the latter, or focusing intently on them. Though the movie isn’t a traditionally integrated musical, its best sequences have the audacity of one. Plenty of ’80s musicals used their pop roots to inch the actual filmmaking away from the imaginative leaps in form made the 1950s and ’60s; sure, the editing has some post-MTV flair, but it’s often in service of concert footage that safely compartmentalizes the music into a familiar framework. The performances in Purple Rain flow in and out of the movie, often dominating it in a way that makes it a more distinctive viewing experience.

The idea that an artist might fictionalize his own story for cinema was around before Purple Rain, though the film’s success likely helped along subsequent entries in the subgenre like 8 Mile. Prince himself starred in two more movies, both self-directed, neither as popular as this one where his neophyte status as an actor couldn’t be clearer. Some musicians make an album whose creative magic they can’t ever reproduce in subsequent releases. Prince, who made nearly 40 studios albums during his legendary career, didn’t have that particular problem. (The album of Purple Rain isn’t even his commercial peak.) But on film, maybe Purple Rain needed to be this specific type of weird, beguiling, sometimes off-putting jolt to the movie-musical form.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.