Even now, some four decades after his death, the name Jimi Hendrix still carries mystique.
He was the psychedelic generation's wizard of the amped-up guitar, capable of transforming its sound into a rain of flowers or shrapnel, and his records were drenched in enough acid to make Sgt. Pepper seem like a shell-shocked recruit. He was the electric gypsy, espousing a cosmic philosophy that aligned him perfectly with the "turn on, tune in" freak-power hippies. And, lest we forget, he was a black American who reclaimed the blues from a cadre of young white British guitarists.
All that is rendered perfectly in director John Ridley's film on Hendrix, "Jimi: All is by My Side." Where most rock-star biopics follow a fairly predictable path — a sort of greatest hits compilation of the artist's career — Ridley (screenwriter for "12 Years a Slave") takes a refreshingly different approach, focusing in detail on one year in Hendrix's life from May 1966-67, when he went from backing-band invisibility to rock superstardom.