It's a movie that embodies the life path of a talented but turbulent businessman on his team, The Revolution. This man begins a series of challenges and rivalries with a vocal rival singer, a thriving romance, and his own dissatisfied squad as his star appears to shine again.
The music is lively, loud, often powerful, sometimes raunchy, yet full of unexpected subtleties and nuances. The staging is frenetic but as perfect as the machines of the art can produce. This is first class music video.
The film is a love letter to collaboration, to passion, and to the power of music: this is Prince's legacy, brought to life nowhere more memorably than in Purple Rain.
Prince's 1984 movie debut seems more like his deification, with an aggressively stupid plot line that serves only to set him up as a paragon of artistic integrity, sexual prowess, and superhuman sensitivity.
[Purple Rain] is probably the flashiest album cover ever to be released as a movie. However, like many album covers, Purple Rain, though sometimes arresting to look at, is a cardboard come-on to the record it contains.
Common Sense Media
June 28, 2016
Prince's rock musical-drama has lots of sex, profanity.
[The plot] is all no more than fancy padding around the film's heart, which only starts to really pump when Prince is up on stage: a teasing, hot amalgam of Marc Bolan, Nijinsky and the Scarlet Pimpernel, as electric as his guitar.
As a debut and a savvy statement of personal enterprise, Purple Rain is quite an accomplishment. As a film, moreover, it is precisely the sort of vehicle one would have wished for Elvis in his Hollywood heyday.
