Movie Review: 'Once Upon a Time in Harlem' is more than a staggering time capsule

We’ve had “Once Upon a Time” in the West, in America, in Hollywood . It's a classic kind of movie title phrase, and a good way to start a fairytale or burnish a myth.

But “Once Upon a Time in Harlem" is a staggering documentary event, and has a different relationship with the past. It takes place over one day about half a century ago, in 1972. It’s about remembering the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, yet another half-century leap in time.

In that way, “Once Upon a Time in Harlem” stretches over more than a century of time. It doesn’t merely resurrect the Harlem Renaissance. It’s more about the act of resurrecting the Harlem Renaissance: the need to remember it, to argue over it and to cherish it. The film is less an act of preservation than a lively and dynamic reminder that history is an ever-unfolding continuum.

It's also just a cocktail party — a really, really amazing cocktail party. In August 1972, the filmmaker William Greaves invited luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance to gather at Duke Ellington’s townhouse and reflect on its legacy. Greaves, with a small camera crew including his son, David, planned to shoot the event on 16 mm for a film called “From These Roots.”

But Greaves ultimately made that 1974 documentary largely with archival photographs. He spent years debating what to do with the footage from the townhouse in 1972, but never found a home for it. After Greaves' death in 2014 at the age of 87, his widow, Louise Aarchambault Greaves, resolved to have the footage restored. David Greaves stepped forward to direct the project to the finish line.

“Once Upon a Time in Harlem,” a miracle of a movie, thus has an intoxicating time-capsule feel, like a ‘70s documentary classic that time somehow forgot. We occasionally hear Greaves’ voice from behind the camera or catch him in a mirror. But the film is largely observational, floating between conversations as the attendees discuss the meaning and nature of the intellectual, artistic and cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance.

On a surface level, there's a lot to look at. The weathered but handsome faces. The vibrancy of the overflowing townhouse rooms. The turtlenecks and cocktail dresses.

But the conversation is stimulating and charged. What, exactly, was the Harlem Renaissance? For those assembled on this day, there's no clear answer. Remembering it requires arguing over where to place the most emphasis. Is it a matter of recalling certain individuals, and if so, who? Or was it a flourishing brought on by something more communal and harder to define? The writer George Schuyler terms it “an awakening of people who wrote and thought.” The poet Arna Bontemps calls it “a prism reflecting all of the Black experience from the beginnings to the present.”

Bontemps’ definition is shared by the spirit of “Once Upon a Time in Harlem.” The movie could hardly be more specifically set, on a single day. In dialogue and breadth, the documentary stretches across the years that lead up to the Harlem Renaissance and reverberates across both its contemporary ’70s time and today, when Black history is under considerable threat . The film's final images are of children outside in the street, a parting glance that propels “Once Upon a Time in Harlem” into the future.

Some of those in attendance include Ida Mae Cullen, widow of the poet Countee Cullen; the writer-artist Richard Bruce Nugent; the painter Aaron Douglas; the socialist and bookstore owner Richard B. Moore; Lee Whipper, actor and founder of the Negro Actors Guild; pianist Eubie Blake; and the scholar John Henrik Clarke. (Ellington was sick and absent, though his presence is felt all around.)

“Once Upon a Time In Harlem” is most moving when the swirl of the party momentarily retreats and the excerpted words of the poets and the writers including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Cullen speak with a depth of meaning that the free-flowing conversation of the gathering — for all its thoughtfulness — can’t match. This is also dazzlingly true of Whipper, a grand and eloquent presence then in his mid-90s who eagerly recites, from memory, his speech from the 1943 film “Mission to Moscow.”

It’s in these moments when any definition between past and present slips away. In “Once Upon a Time in Harlem,” a documentary shared by father and son, the collective spirit and enduring sound of the Harlem Renaissance come thundering into now.

“Once Upon a Time in Harlem,” a Neon release in select theaters Friday, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for some disturbing images, strong racial language, smoking and brief partial nudity. Running time: 100 minutes. Four stars out of four.