The new documentary about George Michael, Andrew Ridgeley and the music they made as Wham! – it’s just called “Wham!” – found me at a time when I was in need of a nostalgic, fantastical elixir, something short, sweet and touching on my sense of national blues. For starters, Wham!, the duo, made soul music that popped. And the film dances through all the thorny moral and ethical questions of white people making black things. Those questions don’t exist at all in this movie. That’s the fantasy. And I’m here for it. But also: Wham! had no thorns.
Here were two white boys from England of solid Greek Cypriot (George) and Egyptian (Andrew) descent, born during the rise of Motown in the early 1960s and bonded together in their adolescence when disco passed the baton of the party to new wave and rap. They synthesized it all (plus a little Barry Manilow and Freddie Mercury, and some Billy Joel) into a genre whose only other alchemists were actually Hall and Oates. In each of the duo’s two dozen or so songs — including “Everything She Wants,” “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” “I’m Your Man,” jams all of them — there’s influence, but in the incantation of the movie there is no suspense. Race doesn’t really exist here.
The film is not concerned with journalism or criticism or music history. Just a bunch of photos and archive interviews, performance recordings, outtakes and music videos. It’s essentially an adaptation, by the director Chris Smith and some very busy editors, of scrapbooks Ridgeley’s mother kept, celebrating everything from the duo’s first attempt to storm the airwaves in 1981 to their acrimonious breakup in 1986. That’s where it ends, a year before the release of Michael’s smash hit album “Faith,” and decades before his death in 2016 at the age of 53. There’s also no mention of Ridgeley’s misunderstood, out-of-print 1990 solo album, Son of Albert.
There aren’t even talking heads. The disembodied voices of Michael and Ridgeley guide the whole thing – musings and memories as narration. (Most of Michael’s are from a BBC Radio interview.) They explain how they met as schoolchildren in the mid-1970s and adopted a mini-block culture from the 1980s. You hear Ridgeley still warmly call Michael by his nickname, Yog, because he was born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou, and you see how their looks flip from leather bar to Richard Simmons.
