Review Summary

“Honeydripper,” John Sayles’s shambling fusion of pop mythology and social mosaic, imagines the world-changing moment, around 1950, in the rural South when a blues guitarist first plugged in his ax and rocked the joint. That cultural harbinger, Sonny Blake (Gary Clark Jr.), is an itinerant, freight-train-hopping young guitar wiz with no particular place to go, who stops off at the sleepy little town of Harmony, Ala. While operating on a mythic level “Honeydripper” also wants to create the same kind of top-to-bottom social microcosm found in many of Mr. Sayles’s films. But this time his attempt to have his characters be simultaneously symbolic and real works at cross purposes. “Honeydripper” is agreeable, well-intentioned and very, very slow. — Stephen Holden, The New York Times