While singing “Get Out of My Way”, the Reverend Vince Anderson soon begins to growl and moan. Anderson, the subject of the oft-rousing documentary “The Reverend,” and his band, the Love Choir, had a 20-year residency at Union Pool, a bar in Williamsburg. And this brassy, organ-slamming, honking representative of what Anderson dubs the “dirty gospel” was the invocation of the Monday night rallies.
A follower of observational cinema, director Nick Canfield follows Anderson in his jams; cooking pastrami at his home in Queens’s Ridgewood neighborhood; works with teenage rappers in Bushwick; and barnstorms with Vote Common Good, an evangelical group focused on energizing religiously-oriented voters to support progressive candidates in the 2018 midterm elections.
Avid kaftans and straw hats, Anderson is a big guy with a rugged singing voice but storytelling cadence as he shares the spiritual journey that took him from a Lutheran childhood in California to Union Theological Seminary in New York. He planned to become a minister but left. (He has since been ordained.)
An early turning point came in college when he walked through a picket line of nuns to see “The Last Temptation of Christ”, with its depiction of a “beautifully human Jesus”, he says.
Most defining came to Union when he crossed the street on Epiphany Sunday and entered the Riverside Church where the sermon of the day was “The Mystery of Christian Calling”. The message, he says, was: “We are all called to goodness and justice. He embraced music as his ministry.
The arrival of Millicent Souris was a godsend. Of their first date, she in equally gorgeous caftans said, “He has no movement. He has nothing. They tied the knot in 2018. There are more fun and thoughtful interviews (Questlove offers a few choice words), as well as thoughts on grace. Canfield’s feature debut is imbued with its own measure of that gentle spirit. He is also fortunately weak in piety.
the reverend
Unclassified. Duration: 1h26. In theaters.
