Keep On Keepin’ On

Shot over the course of almost five years by debut director Alan Hicks, Keep On Keepin’ On pitches a genuinely heartwarming tale about positivity in the face of adversity, and the many divides—racial, cultural, generational—that music can help bridge. It’s ostensibly a biopic of legendary, 93-year-old jazz trumpeter Clark Terry told via his mentorship of an affable, mid-20s piano prodigy stricken with debilitating nerves and near-complete blindness, but it quietly reveals itself to be so much more: an affectionate valentine to the tenacity of the human spirit which never once dips over into the maudlin.
Winner of both the Best New Documentary Director and Audience Award prizes at the Tribecca Film Festival, Keep On Keepin’ On arrives on the heels of two of the most lauded nonfiction music films of the past decade—2012’s Searching For Sugar Man and last year’s Oscar-winning 20 Feet from Stardom—but the music documentaries Hicks’ movie most recalls, and does so favorably, are Thunder Soul and Standing in the Shadow of Motown. These two films gave a deserving spotlight to talents who labored too long in relative anonymity, all the while underscoring the value and importance of passing along lifetimes of music knowledge and industry experience.
In the case of Terry—bedridden due to complications from diabetes during much of the time we see him, but never lacking in spirit—the main vessel for his fount of knowledge is Justin Kauflin, the aforementioned prodigy who he met as part of an outreach class he taught. Separated by more than six decades, they’re still a great match: though Kauflin has been severely limited in vision since he was a toddler, the result of a rare congenital disorder, his mother recalls how without irony he lamented the fact that he didn’t have any great suffering to inform his love and sense of the blues; Terry, meanwhile, a 2010 Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award winner, is hailed by peers and historians as championing an indefatigably happy, improvisational skill and sound.