Purple Rain (1984)

Dearly Beloved, We Are Gathered Here to Talk About Purple Rain Welcome to this episode of The Most Excellent 80s Movies Podcast. Hosts Krissy Lenz (comedian and director at Neighborhood Comedy Theatre) and Nathan Blackwell (independent filmmaker at Squishy Studios) are joined this week by not one but two returning special guests—podcaster and writer Kyle Olson and podcast producer and improv impresario Pete Wright—to dig into one of the most electric, beguiling, and undeniably Prince films ever committed to celluloid: Purple Rain (1984).Neither Krissy nor Nathan had ever seen the movie before this episode—a confession that earns them some gentle ribbing from the two superfans across the table. What unfolds is a warm, funny, and genuinely insightful conversation about Prince as performer, The Kid as character, and what it means to watch a film that is less a story and more a time capsule from another world.🎸 The Concert Film That Got a Plot Attached to ItThe group quickly zeroes in on Purple Rain's greatest paradox: the performances are absolutely transcendent—opening on Let's Go Crazy, arguably one of the greatest concert openers in film history—while the story threading them together is, as Pete diplomatically puts it, a little rough around the edges. Kyle suggests there may exist a perfect 50-minute cut of this film that is simply the greatest concert film ever made. The consensus? Every time the band steps off stage, the movie struggles; every time they step back on, it soars.Pete brings essential context: Purple Rain was a massive cultural moment in 1984, released the same summer as Ghostbusters, and it landed especially hard for Minneapolis audiences who recognized First Avenue and Hennepin Avenue as their own streets, their own stomping grounds. Kyle—who lived in the Twin Cities from 2000 to 2010—had visited First Avenue many times without realizing he was standing in the house that Prince built. This film is a time capsule of a city and a singular artist in full ascent.👊 The Kid Is Kind of a Jerk—and That's Kind of the PointOne of the episode's richest threads is the group wrestling with the fact that Prince plays The Kid—a fictionalized character adjacent to his real life—and The Kid treats nearly everyone around him badly. Krissy notes that she kept waiting for more of the film to show Prince's creative genius on screen the way the music does; instead, we get a young man repeating cycles of trauma and slowly, reluctantly, learning to let others in.Pete makes a fascinating observation: despite Prince being the architect of essentially every creative element in the film—the bands, the songs, the image—he chose to let himself look genuinely bad on screen. That's not a vanity project move. It's something closer to art. The comparison to Eight Mile and Saturday Night Fever arises naturally: all three are films about someone with enormous talent trying to escape the gravitational pull of a difficult past.🎭 Morris Day, Jerome, and the Movie Inside the MovieNo discussion of Purple Rain would be complete without celebrating Morris Day and Jerome Benton, who the hosts agree feel like they wandered in from a much sillier, more vaudevillian film—and are absolutely electric every second they're on screen. Their onstage charisma is unmatched, their comedic chemistry reads as completely natural, and somewhere in the multiverse, per Nathan, there exists a Morris Day and the Time's Big Adventure that we all deserve to see.🎵 A Few More Things Worth Knowing Before You ListenThe group's scale for rating films this episode? Poofy white shirts—on a scale of one to ten.The synchronized choreography in the concert scenes sparks a delightful tangent about the continuum from the Temptations and Four Tops all the way to boy bands—and what was lost in between.Pete drops some genuinely surprising trivia about the iconic custom guitar Apollonia gives The Kid, where it was made, and where the last one lives today.The hosts discuss the original female lead who was meant to star opposite Prince—and the behind-the-scenes reason she didn't.Krissy shares a deeply personal and tearful moment involving the Stranger Things finale and two very specific Prince songs played at two very emotional moments.🎬 The VerdictAll four hosts land at seven poofy white shirts out of ten. The film is imperfect, occasionally baffling, and unmistakably of its moment—but Prince is Prince. Krissy sums it up perfectly: even the things she didn't like, she liked that she didn't like them. This is a movie that ea