In 2020, musician and composer Jon Batiste won an Academy Award, a Golden Globe, a Grammy, and a BAFTA Film Award for co-composing Pixar’s “Soul.” Not to rest on his laurels in 2022, he dominated the Grammy Awards entirely with 11 nominations, the most of the year. The day the nominations were announced, however, Batiste’s partner, writer Suleika Jaoaud, went through her first round of chemotherapy. Her leukemia had returned after many years in remission.
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In the documentary “American Symphony,” director Matthew Heineman (celebrated for incredible docs like “Cartel Land,” “City of Ghosts”) follows the long-term couple through the tumultuous year of 2022. Batiste is at a career-high, critically lauded, and working on his first symphony to be performed at Carnegie Hall. At the same time, Jaoaud receives word that her leukemia has returned, and so she begins treatments and bone marrow transfusions.
The subject matter may differ from Heineman’s other work—high-intensity frontline reports on the devastation of war only at first blush. Isn’t cancer a form of bodily warfare? Underneath it all, “American Symphony” never forgets the beauty of life, telling a story of the sustaining power of art and love.
Here’s the official synopsis:
Early in 2022, multi-instrumentalist Jon Batiste finds himself the most celebrated artist of the year with eleven Grammy nominations, including Album of the Year. In the midst of that triumph, Jon is immersed in his most ambitious challenge yet: composing “American Symphony,” an original symphony that thrillingly reimagines the classical traditions of the form, bringing together an expansive and inclusive diaspora of music for a performance at storied Carnegie Hall. This extraordinary trajectory is upended, however, when Batiste’s life partner – best-selling author Suleika Jaouad – learns that her long-dormant cancer has returned. In the moving and deeply intimate AMERICAN SYMPHONY, Academy Award-nominated and Emmy Award-winning director Matthew Heineman (Cartel Land, The First Wave, Retrograde) delivers a portrait of two inimitable artists at a crossroads and a profound meditation on art, love, and the creative process.
“American Symphony” will be available in theaters on November 24 and streaming on Netflix on November 29. Watch the new trailer below.
