Nearly 20 years after the release of Voodoo, the name D’Angelo still inspires lurid fantasies. The cover of the R&B singer’s iconic sophomore album and its matching video for “Untitled (How Does It Feel),” in which he’s shown in all his sculpted glory, certainly shaped D’Angelo’s image at the time. The clip catered to female desire: His pajama bottoms were just out of frame, creating the illusion that he was standing naked in front of you, showering you (and only you) with all of his attention. It was the launching point for “D’Angelo, sex god” in the wider mainstream—a reputation that, at least based on audience reactions during Saturday’s premiere of Devil’s Pie, remains very much intact. Wolf whistles, moans, and women yelling “thank you Jesus!” could be heard throughout the Tribeca Film Festival screening of the documentary, even as it detailed just how uncomfortable this had made the introverted, church-raised D’Angelo.
Shortly after the tour for his platinum-selling Voodoo, D’Angelo virtually disappeared from the public eye. He returned 14 years later with Black Messiah, his surprise third album. What happened in between has been speculated on endlessly, thanks to his multiple arrests (for assaulting a woman at a gas station, marijuana possession, carrying a concealed weapon, driving under the influence, and soliciting an undercover cop for sex), his time in rehab, and his generally reclusive personality. Devil’s Pie doesn’t necessarily reveal more about those private years, but it does offer rare candid moments with D’Angelo regarding them. That he struggled with alcohol and drug abuse back then is well known by this point, but to hear it from the man himself—that he reached such a low point, he was incapable of making music—is especially heartbreaking.
The director, Dutch filmmaker Carine Bijlsma, said during the post-film Q&A that she got the idea for Devil’s Pie around 2010, while wondering (like so many of us) what had happened to D’Angelo. After tracking down the email of his collaborator Kendra Foster and proposing the project, Bijlsma was eventually invited on his 2015 Second Coming tour and filmed the footage herself over the course of two years. It’s quite possible D’Angelo would’ve clammed up around a bigger camera crew, but with just Bijlsma trailing him, he seems surprisingly at ease being himself in the film.
It’s an interesting dynamic, considering Devil’s Pie puts D’Angelo under the gaze of a female filmmaker when it was the female gaze that D’Angelo grappled with before his reclusion. The son of a Pentecostal preacher, D’Angelo grew up in a Virginia church where secular music had the power to scandalize. If he sought liberation by singing about making women wet between the thighs, he ultimately felt just as trapped by it. When he debuted in 1995 with Brown Sugar, the 21-year-old was praised for his genre-shifting, well-beyond-his-years musicianship, but by the Voodoo tour, he could hardly get through a song without women yelling at him to take off his shirt. This created a chasm between D’Angelo the musician and D’Angelo the celebrity, with the singer experiencing residual guilt from his religious upbringing due to his sex-symbol status. In the film, Questlove says that D’Angelo also suffered from the kind of survivor’s guilt that often plagues black geniuses. He was gifted with a soul-penetrating voice and an unconventional sense of compositional arrangement, but it was the fame part of his career that tripped him up.
Bijlsma’s camera eschews objectification. It is not leering, worshipping, or even judging. It is sympathetic of a man who was not emotionally equipped for the kind of spotlight he was thrown into. As a documentary, it’s fairly standard. The talking-head interviews—mostly with Questlove and D’Angelo’s tour manager Alan Leeds, who also executive-produced the doc—are a little too repetitive about D’Angelo being this elusive, introverted man (which is like stating that water is wet). When Bijlsma catches intimate glimpses of him, like when he’s excitedly jamming before a show, that’s when Devil’s Pie feels enlightening. It may leave you wanting more of D’Angelo, though—a familiar sentiment.
Though his comeback was met with overwhelming acclaim, Devil’s Pie illuminates the anxiety and insecurity that still clouds the singer’s mind. Backstage after a show in 2015, D’Angelo’s manager reads aloud just few positive reactions from social media. D’Angelo, in quiet disbelief, responds, “That was from tonight?” It is endearing, and a bit heartrending as well. D’Angelo’s still haunted by his demons, but he’s in a good place now—specifically, the studio. The documentary ends with the news that he’s currently working on his fourth album. No word on the expected wait.
