For nearly four decades, Graceland has been narrated as a story about Paul Simon — his artistic gamble, his Grammy, the ethics of an American songwriter crossing a cultural boycott to record in Johannesburg. Bill Condon’s The Road Home proposes a different center of gravity. The first-look image of Thabo Rametsi as Hugh Masekela, trumpet raised, announces a biopic that means to tell the Graceland affair from the vantage of the South African musicians who lived the boycott, not the man who breached it.

As Deadline first reported, the portrait was released by the film’s backers — Canal+, Studiocanal and Flora Films — while cameras keep rolling in South Africa. It is the first look at Rametsi, best known for the hostage thriller Silverton Siege, inhabiting a musician who turned exile into a global argument for his country.

The Road Home locates Masekela at a fracture point. When the Anti-Apartheid Movement calls a boycott against his friend Paul Simon over Graceland, the trumpeter breaks with a man who had been mentor and ally, and joins fellow exile Miriam Makeba to assemble the Graceland band — a supergroup conceived to carry South Africa’s music, and its accusation, onto the world’s stages.

The casting reads as a thesis. Cynthia Erivo plays Makeba, the singer the world called Mama Africa; Johnny Flynn is Simon; Guy Pearce is Trevor Huddleston, the anti-apartheid priest who once handed a teenage Masekela his first trumpet. Working from a script by Michael Bronner, Condon returns to the musical terrain of Dreamgirls but with the moral weather of Gods and Monsters — the register in which he is most persuasive, using show business as a proxy for larger reckonings.

Handing Masekela to Rametsi rather than an imported star is the production’s first ethical decision. A story about who is entitled to speak for South African music can hardly afford to voice that music from outside, and Masekela’s own biography — fleeing the country after the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, then three decades in exile across Britain and the United States — is inseparable from the sound the film wants to reclaim.

Principal photography is under way in South Africa, the backers confirm, the country now doubling for its own history: the album that once split a friendship still teaching pop music that neutrality was itself a position.

Tags: casting, Cynthia Erivo, Bill Condon, Thabo Rametsi, Hugh Masekela, The Road Home

Rametsi’s first look as Masekela frames Condon’s ‘The Road Home’ as Graceland told from exile

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