“Even more impressive than Jones’s gift for entertaining and her magnetic stage presence is her ability to maintain a positive attitude during the fight of her life.”
“...When she bounds onstage with a holler and a howl — and diction that nails every last word to the melody — it’s clear she deserves that exclamation point in the title.”
“Watch as Kopple and Jones chat with programmer Basil Tsiokos about the documentary, which offers a moving portrait of personal strength and resilience as it traces Jones’s journey to stardom against the backdrop of illness.”
“Heart and soul aplenty in ‘Miss Sharon Jones!’”
Two-time Oscar winner Barbara Kopple follows the soul singer Sharon Jones from the moment she is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer to her first performance after her recovery. In one of the very first scenes all her hair gets shaved off. Jones’s manager postpones all promotional activities for the new album, and for the six-month duration of the chemotherapy she moves in with a dietician girlfriend. The members of her backup band The Dap-Kings see their incomes slump overnight, and the trumpeter decides to accept a well-paid job in talk show host Jimmy Fallon’s house band. At the lowest point during chemo, Jones even loses her eyebrows, but this gutsy woman – known as the female James Brown – gradually pulls herself back up again. She’s thrilled to be invited onto The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and she shows off her bald head on the cover of The Village Voice with the headline “Soul Survivor.” After one more little setback, just five weeks after the end of her course of treatment, she’s back onstage dancing and singing: “I’m alive!” [At the premiere of Miss Sharon Jones! in September of this year, Jones announced that the cancer had returned.]