'Jimi' star almost didn't take the stage

LOS ANGELES – Bringing Jimi Hendrix to life on the big screen is no small acting task. And Andre Benjamin wasn't sure he was up to it.

"I turned it down twice," says Benjamin, 39, who stars in Jimi: All Is By My Side, which hits theaters Friday after a successful festival-circuit tour. "Three days before we were supposed to all go to Ireland to begin shooting, I said I couldn't do it."

At issue was the news that although writer/director John Ridley had told Benjamin he would be filmed faking Hendrix riffs right-handed, flipping the image to match Hendrix's left-handed pyrotechnics would prove too costly.

"I felt I couldn't pull off learning where all the notes and chords were with the other hand in enough time," says Benjamin, who as Andre 3000 is Big Boi's other half in the hit-making (2003's Hey Ya!) hip-hop duo Outkast, whose latest reunion-tour coup is selling out three hometown shows in Atlanta this weekend.

"I didn't want to make Jimi's legacy look silly," he says, sporting an oversized Army jacket, painted jeans and large white sunglasses. "But I'd already lost the weight and done the work, I was in it. I was trapped."

That's fortunate for Hendrix fans, as Benjamin channels the Seattle-born legend during his innocent pre-fame days of 1966 and 1967. Hendrix died of drug-related complications on Sept. 18, 1970, at age 27.

Between the wide smile, singsong voice and pigeon-toed walk, Benjamin's performance captures a portrait of the guitar artist as a young man guided as much by an internal muse as two women, early promoter Linda Keith and first English girlfriend Kathy Etchingham.

The film already has garnered its share of heat. Experience Hendrix, which oversees the musician's estate, did not grant Ridley (an Oscar winner for his 12 Years A Slave adapted screenplay) access to Hendrix's recorded oeuvre, although that's almost moot in a movie that ends as Hendrix gets set to release his first album, 1967's Are You Experienced.

"The music-rights issue is something all biopics face, because if it's withheld you could be handicapped, but if you co-operate (with the estate) it brings into question how honest you can be," says Anthony DeCurtis, contributing editor at Rolling Stone.

For DeCurtis, Jimi: All Is By My Side is another valuable addition to the Hendrix historical narrative, which already has been the subject of many documentaries and posthumous album releases.

"There will be plenty more movies done about him because he was simply that important a musical figure," he says. "This film is just a part of that larger discussion. Jimi is just a fascinating person on so many levels, from his skills to the racial pressures that were on a black musician who was always talking about Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton. There's a lot there."

Particularly upset by this portrait of Hendrix's life is Etchingham: "Instead of (the film depicting) Jimi's humor and creativity … we were shown a gloomy and depressing dark tale that pictures Jimi as some sort of moronic loser," Etchingham writes on her website.

Ridley shrugs at the charge that Hendrix's bad behavior wasn't authentic. "It's out there, and we didn't want to gloss over anything," he says, adding that his mission was to introduce viewers to the man who later became a myth.

"Jimi is like Che (Guevara, a Fidel Castro ally in the Cuban Revolution). Kids today know the name, they have the T-shirt, but they really don't know what Che was about, and so in that same sense, I wanted to bring people into the moment where Jimi became Jimi."

Drawing deeply from advice from mentors such as Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas (Ridley wrote the screenplay for Lucas' Red Tails), the director leans on a loose camera style that always defers to the actors' interplay.

"Coppola told me you can't put chemistry on screen unless it's really happening between your actors naturally," says Ridley, whose star spent two months preparing for his role as Hendrix. "I owe so much to Andre, Imogen (Poots as Keith) and Hayley (Atwell as Etchingham)."

Benjamin just throws the compliment back at his director.

"John said, 'Aim for the human,' and that's the simplest way I can put it," he says. "What would Jimi want you to know that you can't find on YouTube? We've seen all the great performances, Monterey (Pop Festival), him burning the guitar, we've seen his confidence. But what got him to that point?"

Benjamin smiles.

"You know, when Jimi left New York (to go to England and make his name), he left with his guitar, one shirt, a Bob Dylan record and some Noxzema for his skin," he says. "The legend, we got to know later. But it's that guy I wanted to know."