TV Movie Review: 'The Bobby DeBarge Story' Is Earnest, Sad, Camp

Criticizing TV One's The Bobby DeBarge Story is like having to discipline a puppy that has urinated on the floor, you don't want to be mean, but you have to let the puppy know not to do that again. As with a puppy, I will attempt to be gentle, but this is a huge puddle on the floor. This earnest, high camp, biopic mixes emotional honesty with some of the cringiest costumes and performances of 2019.

Multi-hyphenate entertainer, Roshon Fegan, plays the role of Bobby DeBarge, among the oldest of the DeBarge siblings, who would each find a measure of success on the Motown label in the late 70s and early 80s. It was Bobby and his brother Tommy (Blue Kimble) who would break out of the incredibly talented DeBarge family first.

Bobby and Tommy broke out with the seminal, underrated R&B group Switch. Discovered initially by Barry White in Detroit, it wasn't until the band moved to Los Angeles and got in front of former Jackson 5 member, Jermaine Jackson, that Switch got its short lived big break. I say short lived because not long after breaking out with the hit "There'll Never Be," Bobby's ongoing drug problem would cause a break in the band.

Bobby was intended to go solo while helping to mentor his six younger siblings in the band DeBarge. Bobby's siblings would go on to overshadow their older brother, a process made easier by Bobby's growing drug abuse, which torpedoed his solo career, especially after falling out with Jermaine Jackson. (My apologies to the uncanny actor who portrays Jermaine in the movie, TV One does not credit him nor does IMDB. He was one of the highlights of the movie, if only for his uncanny resemblance to Jermaine.)

The Bobby DeBarge Story was directed by Russ Parr, whose work is best known from the trash-tastic television drama, Saints and Sinners. That show is good, solid, melodrama. The Bobby DeBarge Story sadly, is pure camp debacle. The acting is dominated by a series of awful wigs, which I can only assume the production never bothered to try to make realistic.

The wigs in The Bobby DeBarge Story deserve their own credits for how unnaturally they stand apart from the actor attempting to corral them to their skull. Poor Roshon Fegan's wig constantly looks as if it is attempting to escape. There is comically little attempt to make the seventies and eighties fashion look natural, and the effect is jarring when we are supposed to be immersed in heavy drama and there is a whole lot of that going on in this movie.

Bobby DeBarge's life was filled with tragedies and minor triumphs. His father, a white French ex-pat, was a horrific abuser, who abused his wife and children physically, emotionally, and sexually. Bobby became addicted to heroin at 16 years old, while also discovering his musical talent. He would eventually fall into cocaine and crack addiction in the 80s.

Along the way, Bobby made some very good R&B music with Switch, and he was beloved by his siblings, as he helped them break into the music business. This movie doesn't do much to tell that story well, mostly portraying Bobby as a constant mess and disappointment to his family, which I am sure in many ways he was, but the film isn't particularly fair to that side of the story.

The film is far too clumsy to worry too much about how true or fair the story really is. For instance, Bobby's arrest and incarceration on drug charges. So clumsy is the production design and costume that I believed it was Bobby's brother, Chico, who had been arrested with Bobby because the actor hired to play Bobby's co-conspirator looks like the actor hired to play Chico, right down to the bad wig.

The sequence of events however are even more clumsy. Bobby goes from the happiest moment of his life, the birth of his first child, immediately to becoming a drug trafficker. One minute he appears sober and happy, the next scene he's retrieving drugs from the back of a truck and taping them to his friend's torso to be sent somewhere on a plane.

One of the consistent motifs of The Bobby DeBarge Story is the feeling that transition scenes are missing. Scenes that might provide context or backstory to a bigger, more important scene, feel as if they are missing from the final film. There is no rest for weary audience members who go from one jarring, dramatic scene to the next, with little context and the DeBarge wikipedia page to try to make sense of everything. There is never a good sense where we are in time with this movie.

The film then fudges the timeline reveal of Bobby DeBarge's HIV diagnosis, by having him assaulted in prison leading to the diagnosis. In reality, DeBarge revealed to his family that he was HIV positive prior to going to prison in 1988. This change of the timeline doesn't add anything to the story. The prison assault adds an unnecessary and problematic aspect to the movie, as the prisoner leading the assault on Bobby makes mention of how attractive DeBarge is before he and other inmates assault the singer.

I can't find any evidence as to whether Bobby DeBarge was assaulted in prison or not, but the implication in the movie is that Bobby's HIV diagnosis and Bobby's time in prison, including this assault, are linked. This could be a clumsy oversight by the director and screenwriter, but it is a highly irresponsible oversight to insinuate a prison rape even by accident.

Roshon Fegan has moments in The Bobby DeBarge Story where he can out work the wig on his head, but those moments are few and far between. He has a lovely voice and he is unquestionably dedicated to the drama he's portraying onscreen, but more often than not, the production embarrasses him and stifles him with awkward, cringeworthy, costumes, dialogue and sets. A major movie star would have a hard time overcoming the challenges placed in front of the relative newcomer Fegan.

There is a genuine quality to the acting in The Bobby DeBarge Story. This cast is very dedicated but there is a sad, poignant quality to the performances by actors who don't realize how badly they are being let down by director, producers, and costumers. These actors do the best they can with some truly terrible material here and I don't want to single them out as the problem here. It's everything else that is deeply wrong with The Bobby DeBarge Story.

The Bobby DeBarge Story debuts Saturday, June 29th, at 8PM ET, 7PM CT on TV One.