What Happened, Miss Simone?

2015

1 hr. 41 min.

Documentary

Biography

Music

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90%

51 Reviews

Tomatometer

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1,000+ Ratings

Audience Score

Classically trained pianist, dive-bar chanteuse, black power icon and legendary recording artist Nina Simone lived a life of brutal honesty, musical genius, and tortured melancholy.

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Critics Consensus

What Happened, Miss Simone? is a compelling -- albeit necessarily incomplete -- overview of its complex subject's singular artistic legacy and fascinating life.

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Torin F

MISS SIMONE is a well-crafted documentary about artistry, mental illness, the cost of fame, and the deeper personal impact of the fight for civil rights. The music is secondary to the story of her struggles, including those who supported her, as well as those who suffered. It's not an uplifting or inspiring tale by any means, though Nina's resilience is admirable.

Rated 3 out of 5 stars

12/19/23

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Marco M

Truly makes you appreciate Nina more and the music she made.

Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars

06/13/22

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Audience Member

I think that this should be a 10-part series. I think we could use 20 more interviews jumping over her entire career. love her daughter's perspective. <3 it was absolutely what she saw. But Nina Simone deserves a devotion, including her family's world. Like a 10-part series of devotion, from 150 narratives.

Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars

02/19/23

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Audience Member

Quoting from Maya Angelou for the title, this Oscar nominee for Best Documentary Feature is a crushingly melancholy biography chronicling black jazz pianist and singer Nina Simone's incredible vocal and piano skills, her ascension from a humble classical piano student to jazz sensation and her plunge into notoriety as a proviolent civil rights activist, maniac depression, domestic abuse and sex obsession.

Rated 4 out of 5 stars

01/22/23

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Audience Member

A stunning account of a complex, tortured genius. At times you feel like a privileged witness to some of the seminal moments in American cultural history. Equal parts inspiring and tragic.

Rated 5 out of 5 stars

01/28/23

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Audience Member

Nina Simone wanted to be the first classical pianist to play Carnegie Hall, but events in her life were such that she started playing in jazz clubs and developed a long career as a singer and songwriter. The film reviews her life, through interviews with her daughter, ex-husband, and her lead guitarist, among others, as well as through her diary writings and recorded interviews. I think what is most fascinating and makes the film completely worth it is the concert footage. You get to hear a lot of the songs that made her famous as she sang them in various venues. I also did not know that she was as active in the civil rights movement as she was, and her activism and disillusionment with America seemed to consume her. I am not sure that I walked away from this with a clear picture of what happened; her ex-husband never really opens up about their relationship. Her daughter did, and you get a better sense of a woman who probably was suffering a mental illness before it was commonly understood. But thumbs up from me. The film did what a good documentary does – revealing other sides of the personalities they explore, things that I did not know. And I loved listening to her again, especially through her concerts.

Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars

02/20/23

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Liz Garbus

Director

Lisa Simone Kelly

Actor

Roger Nupie

Actor

Al Schackman

Actor

George Wein

Actor

Stanley Crouch

Actor

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Leigh Kolb

Bitch Media

Director Liz Garbus does a beautiful job of packing a complex life into the film - from Simone's childhood as Eunice Waymon in the Jim Crow South through to her later years of self-exile in Liberia and France.

Jan 28, 2021

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Leslie Felperin

Hollywood Reporter

What Miss Simone does have going for it is its unique access to extremely rare material, some of it never seen publicly before.

Jul 24, 2018

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Anisha Jhaveri

indieWire

We may now have jarring insights into the mother, the activist and the tortured soul at the root of Simone's career, but it's the legendary songstress who ultimately shines through.

Rated: B

Oct 28, 2017

Full Review

Brett Michael Dykes

Uproxx

The alternately revolutionary and dispiriting saga of a combative, unapologetic and astoundingly gifted soul singer.

Dec 29, 2021

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Graeme Tuckett

Stuff.co.nz

A blazingly intelligent, nuanced and insightful dive into the life of the woman born Eunice Waymon and her journey into gospel, classical, jazz and blues.

Dec 17, 2021

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Alex Denney

NME (New Musical Express)

A complex look at the soul icon and how activism and violence shaped her sound...

Rated: 4/5

Apr 22, 2021

Full Review

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Synopsis

Classically trained pianist, dive-bar chanteuse, black power icon and legendary recording artist Nina Simone lived a life of brutal honesty, musical genius, and tortured melancholy.

Director: Liz Garbus
Executive Producer: Sidney Beaumont, Adam Del Deo, Jon Kamen, Lisa Simone Kelly
Production Co: Moxie Firecracker Films, RadicalMedia, Netflix
Genre: Documentary, Biography, Music
Original Language: English
Release Date (Streaming): Dec 5, 2016

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