It almost seems unfair, at this point, to post a review of Dan Pritzker’s silent film Louis. It’s not that I haven’t seen the the film, I have, but I’m not positive that I’ve actually heard it. Featuring a flowing musical score penned by Jazz’s presiding dean, Wynton Marsalis, the film will be on tour through the last week of August with live accompaniment by Marsalis, pianist Cecile Licad and a ten-piece ensemble. If the phrase “concert film” has been claimed by documentarians, then the only other term I could think of for Louis is “event film”. Recounting a reverie of the early life of trumpet great Louis Armstrong, the film’s five live showings will be nothing short of a grand event.

Pritzker and writers Derick Martini, Steve Martini and David Rothschild came up with a gimmick film, a riff on a bygone era of cinema and music; the birth, as it were, of both. We are brought into early 20^th century New Orleans, a town with a hopping brothel, and evil magistrate, and streets teeming with competing horn blowers. The tale follows our young protagonist, Louis (Anthony Coleman), as he gets mixed up in the affairs of Grace (Shanti Lowry), a woman of the night looking to protect her newborn from the horrors of the world she has endured. Judge Perry (Jackie Earle Haley) rules the town by force, and once he learns he is the father of Grace’s baby, he sicks his goon Pat McMurphy (Michael Rooker) on her in hopes of shutting her up. That is, not if Louis has anything to say about it. Read on…