Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project Barely Breaches the Poet’s Atmosphere

Throughout Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson’s documentary revisits a conversation between Giovanni, the famed poet, and James Baldwin recorded in 1971 for the TV show SOUL!. It’s a beautiful conversation between two passionate people sharing thoughts on Black life, the Civil Rights Movement, art and religion. You can find the whole thing on YouTube, and I recommend it for the pair’s observations on Jesus and the Black church experience, if nothing else. 

Seeing these intellectual titans converse, it’s hard not to think about Raoul Peck’s outstanding 2016 documentary on Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro, and compare it to Going to Mars. It may be a little unfair, but as Going to Mars flits between Giovanni’s remembrances, her life now, and her impact on her readers, you can’t help but wonder if the film might make a bigger impact if directors Brewster and Stephenson had something of Peck’s analytical mindset toward their subject.

As it is, Going to Mars is pleasant enough, but could easily be more. It occasionally hints at interesting aspects of Giovanni’s storied career and legacy, but its most intriguing elements get lost in the sauce. The filmmakers are clearly (and rightly) enamored with Giovanni, and their adoration results in a fine documentary. However, it leaves several opportunities to interrogate the themes and influence of the poet’s work—and the poet herself—on the table, placing a number of potential discussions tantalizingly out of reach.

Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project has three focuses. The first is standard portrait stuff covering Giovanni’s personal and professional history. The second (and most interesting) is her legacy—her impact on contemporary culture, and political and artistic movements like Black Lives Matter, Afropunk and Afrofuturism. Finally, the film’s main thread follows Giovanni between 2017 and 2020, during which she publishes the poetry collections A Good Cry and Make Me Rain, and reconnects with her estranged son, Thomas, and his daughter Kai. 

Any one of these would make a fine documentary on its own, particularly if those hypothetical films were more willing to critically examine their subject. Part of the reason Going to Mars is not is that Giovanni is a tough nut to crack. Her memory is selective and, at 80 years old, inconsistently reliable, a characteristic she is bluntly honest about from the beginning. Other topics she refuses to discuss out of hand.

We get suggestions from people around Giovanni—her spouse Virginia, some colleagues and friends—that she’s not the easiest person to deal with. This is further cemented by the stories Giovanni tells about her tough-love approach to raising her son, and the fact that their relationship now is strained as a result of her parenting. She seems cactus-like, fascinating to look at and difficult to approach directly, though you can’t help but want to get as close as you can out of sheer curiosity. 

But as much as we observe parts of the poet that make her a fascinating character, those layers are never peeled back as much as they could be, largely because the filmmakers seem uninterested in pushing back when she stonewalls. Much of Going to Mars follows Giovanni on tour, with adoring crowds applauding, laughing appreciatively at her brutal honesty and sharing their personal connections to her work. These moments are often moving—Giovanni herself seems moved by every one she hears—but after a certain point, they approach hagiography.

One way to get at your subject when they’re either limitedly compliant or unavailable is to look at their work, how it comments on the world, and how others have responded to it; this is the tack Peck took with I Am Not Your Negro to impressive effect. Unfortunately, that aspect gets short shrift in Going to Mars. 

The film’s title comes from Giovanni’s insistence that Black women belong in space, describing the Black experience as “Going from a known through an unknown, to an unknown.” Late in the film, Giovanni brings this up during a reading at an Afrofuturist music festival to a rapturous audience, many of them millennials and Gen Z-ers. Afrofuturism is a fascinating subgenre with roots in every form of art you care to name, and the crowd’s response to Giovanni suggests there’s a worthy conversation to be had about her stamp on the genre and rising generations of Black artists. We never get that conversation beyond seeing groups of young people engage joyfully with her poetry. It feels like a missed opportunity to expand the film’s scope, allowing us to grasp Giovanni’s legacy not just as she sees it, but as it’s understood by those she’s inspired.

Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project does an admirable job capturing the aesthetic of Nikki Giovanni’s life and poetry. It offers windows into certain parts of history, and glimpses into her ongoing evolution as an artist. Unfortunately, those glimpses don’t offer enough to be memorable. We leave Going to Mars knowing Giovanni is a beloved public figure, which we already knew going in, but we don’t get a sense of what she’s inspired in others, what her work has helped build, or how she truly feels about all of it.

Director: Joe Brewster, Michèle Stephenson
Release Date: January 8, 2024

Abby Olcese is an entertainment writer based in Kansas City. Her work has appeared at /Film, rogerebert.com, Crooked Marquee, Sojourners Magazine, and Think Christian. You can follow her adventures and pop culture obsessions at @abbyolcese.