Lifetime’s Aaliyah biopic proves the haters right

Aaliyah: The Princess Of R&B, Lifetime’s latest geek-show biopic, should not exist. But for a sliver of its two-hour runtime, it’s clear how a person of sound mind could conclude it should.
The fleeting moments of competence and grace come at the tail-end of the film’s most salacious and fraught material. Aaliyah (Alexandra Shipp) is struggling to reassemble her sense of self after being forbidden to see R. Kelly (Clé Bennett) and forced to annul their secret, illegal marriage, which was sealed at a Chicagoland Sheraton when she was 15 and he was 27. It’s hard enough to climb out of the emotional morass created by the permanent loss of your first love—the two reportedly never saw each other again—but Kelly was also the mastermind behind Aaliyah’s hit debut, Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number. In Kelly, Aaliyah lost not only a lover, but her formative musical mentor, the man who helped her realize her dreams of becoming an R&B superstar.
Amid the freefall, Aaliyah’s mother Diane (Rachael Crawford) gives her daughter a much needed pep talk, reminding her she was as much an architect of her success as was Kelly and encouraging her to believe in her ability to forge on without him. When Aaliyah is set to work on her sophomore album, her handlers urge her to record with any number of R&B producers currently on a hot streak. Instead, Aaliyah opts to work with Timbaland and Missy Elliott (Izaak Smith and Chattrisse Dolabaille), then a pair of unknown quantities from Norfolk, Virginia who were as terrified to work with a star on the rise as Aaliyah was by the prospect of finding out Kelly was the magician and she was merely the assistant. The three form an easy bond and churn out One In A Million, still considered the master stroke of Aaliyah’s too-brief career.
Had Princess spent more time on Aaliyah’s rebuilding phase, it would make for a sympathetic film, at least by Lifetime standards, and it would have offered a new take on a familiar throughline. Music history is replete with ingenues who had to outrun a svengali’s shadow, and Aaliyah’s story is particularly triumphant now, given some women who claim they had dalliances with Kelly as teenagers have said the experience drove them to suicide. The limited scope would have also dialed down the sensationalism by trimming the sick-making “courtship.”