Movie Review | The Boston Globe (Sunday Arts)
FILM: 042626 -‘What’s Love Got to Do with It’ burns with the truth of I, Tina

There are music biopics that polish a legend into myth, and then there are films that risk something messier: telling the story as it felt from the inside. What’s Love Got to Do with It (1993), drawn from I, Tina by Tina Turner and Kurt Loder, lands firmly in the latter camp—raw, unsettling, and powered by a performance that refuses to be forgotten.

Directed by Brian Gibson, the film traces Turner’s journey from Anna Mae Bullock, a church-raised girl from Nutbush, Tennessee, to an international icon who had to fight—physically, emotionally, and professionally—for every inch of her autonomy. The spine of the film is not fame but survival, and that distinction gives it its enduring charge.

Angela Bassett’s portrayal of Tina Turner is, by now, the stuff of cinematic legend, but revisiting it underscores just how precise and athletic it is. This is not mere imitation—the rasp, the strut, the explosive stage presence—it’s embodiment. Bassett captures the way performance becomes both armor and release. Watch her onstage and you see liberation; watch her offstage and you see the cost of earning it.

Opposite her, Laurence Fishburne’s Ike Turner is charismatic, volatile, and terrifyingly human. The film resists flattening him into a caricature, which makes the depiction of abuse all the more disturbing. It’s not stylized or softened; it’s repetitive, exhausting, and inescapable—the way trauma often is. Some viewers then and now have questioned whether the film veers into sensationalism, but its source material, I, Tina, makes clear that the horror is not invention. If anything, the film compresses what was a long, grinding ordeal into something narratively manageable.

Where the movie diverges from strict biography is in structure. Like many adaptations, it reshapes timelines and simplifies the business mechanics of Turner’s comeback. The Las Vegas years, the years in the wilderness, the slow rebuilding of a career in Europe—these are condensed into a more conventional arc of fall and rise. Yet the emotional truth, the core testimony of I, Tina, remains intact: that Tina Turner’s greatest achievement was not a hit record, but reclaiming her name, her body, and her future.

Visually, Gibson’s direction alternates between the kinetic electricity of performance and the claustrophobia of domestic spaces. Concert scenes pulse with color and motion; private moments feel tight, almost airless. That contrast is the film’s language: the public roar versus the private silence.

What lingers, decades on, is how the film reframes the idea of a “comeback.” When Turner storms back onto the stage later in the film, it’s not simply a career revival—it’s an act of authorship. The woman we see is no longer being produced; she is producing herself.

In an era when biopics often chase awards through mimicry and nostalgia, What’s Love Got to Do with It still feels bracingly direct. It doesn’t ask you to admire Tina Turner. It asks you to understand what it took for her to stand there at all.

And in that understanding lies its power.