Keyshia Cole: This Is My Story (Lifetime Movie Network, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Lifetime movie they showed after that, Keyshia Cole: This Is My Story, was a good deal more interesting. It deals with the popular soul/R&B singer Keyshia Cole – someone I’d vaguely heard of but didn’t know before – and Cole not only executive-produced the movie but played herself in it. (The 40-something Cole is surprisingly credible as her teenage self, assuming it is indeed she and not another actor playing the character younger; imdb.com doesn’t list anybody else in the role but then their credits list is woefully incomplete, including no mention of the actors playing the two men in Cole’s life, professional basketball player Daniel Gibson and would-be rapper Niko Khale.) The film was co-directed by Manu Boyer (a white man) and D’Angela Proctor (a Black woman) from a script by Angelica Chéri (who I’m presuming is a Black woman, though imdb.com doesn’t show a photo), and it opens in 2021 with the funeral in Oakland, California of Cole’s biological mother, Francine “Frankie” Lons (a terrific performance by Debbi Morgan, who’s been active since the 1970’s and was in Roots: The Next Generation). The film flashes back to 1999 and the troubled relationship between Cole and her adoptive parents, family friends Leon and Yvonne Cole. Leon is easygoing but Yvonne is a tough M.F., literally locking Keyshia out of the house when Keyshia stays out late with her boyfriend Jamal. Yvonne is worried shitless that Jamal (or some other guy) is going to get Keyshia pregnant, and she doesn’t believe Keyshia’s insistence that she and Jamal are not having sex. The reason Yvonne is so worried about this becomes apparent when we get to know Frankie, Keyshia’s biological mother, who’s an alcoholic and crack addict willing to trade sex for drugs. In fact, we’re pretty sure that’s how Keyshia came to exist in the first place, along with six other half-siblings.

Though the story as shown here delves into the rest of Keyshia’s life – including the $14,000 award she gets from the government when she turns 18, which allows her to relocate from Oakland to L.A. away from Yvonne’s concentration-camp commandant control of her life and kick-start her entry into the music business – the key plot issues are Keyshia’s relationship with her mom and her ongoing uncertainty about who her biological father is. There’s a peculiar scene in a nearly empty Black church in which she approaches the minister for help praying to God for the success of her music career – I was wondering briefly whether Chéri was going to make Keyshia a church girl like Aretha Franklin and build conflict within her between her religious beliefs and her entry into the secular music world, but no-o-o-o-o – instead Keyshia gets a job in a Black beauty parlor and seeks in vain for an entrée into the music biz. She gets her chance when she hears about a party being thrown by and for various music magnates, both white and Black, and after seeing through the transparent attempt of a Black hustler who wants her to come to his place so he can “hear her demos,” she hooks up (platonically) with white producer Ron Fair (Douglas Dickerman) of A&M Records, who signs her and produces her first album, the sensationally successful The Way It Is (2005). Keyshia hooks up with Daniel Gibson and has a son with him, the two of them end up doing a reality-TV show on Black Entertainment Television (one wonders if the network booked them after the sensational success of their reality series with Whitney Houston and her scapegrace husband, Bobby Brown; they also did a reality series with Toni Braxton and her alliteratively named family). Only she calls a halt to it after three seasons, much to the disappointment of her mom and her siblings, who were making money off it. In fact, they were doing so well behind it they sneak around Keyshia’s back and make their own deal with BET to continue it. Her relationship with Gibson ends when she finds a pair of red panties in his laundry and confronts him; later she hooks up with Niko but that doesn't last either.

Throughout the film Keyshia worries about her mom doing drugs, having sex with bad men to get drugs, and ultimately dying of an overdose. Mom goes into rehab at least twice – the first time at Keyshia’s insistence and the second time as her own idea – and she speaks movingly about the demons within her that keep leading her to use. As someone who lived through a relationship with an alcoholic who ultimately drank himself to death, stories like this have a personal resonance with me. Alas, Keyshia’s mom has a fatal overdose right on her 61st birthday (itself a resonant date with me since my younger brother died at 61), and at least as depicted here she lost consciousness right as Keyshia was calling her on her cell phone. Mom tried to answer the call but went under just before she could swipe – one wonders if this is how it really happened or this was one of the scenes Angelica Chéri embellished, as we were warned she had with a disclaimer at the end indicating that some scenes had been fictionalized. But whatever the truth of how Frankie Lons met her end, it’s a real tragedy and an indication of the power of addiction: nothing, including having a celebrity daughter and being able to have anything she could want (at least anything material), could sway Frankie from the path of self-destruction and the bad habits that took her life at the end. Incidentally, Keyshia also locates her biological father, a man named Virgil Miller, though she remains uncertain about it because he refuses to take the DNA test that would definitively establish his paternity. (One would think he would, if only because then he could have bragging rights: “Hey, I’m Keyshia Cole’s father!”) I wasn’t all that interested in this movie – Keyshia Cole was one of those names at the periphery of my consciousness, and though she sings instead of raps her early mentors included rappers like M.C. Hammer and the late Tupac Shakur, which wasn’t exactly calculated to make me take an interest in her – but I was rewarded with a powerful generational role-reversal tale in which the offspring has to deal with a parent’s drug addiction, and Debbi Morgan’s indelible performance (as well as Cole’s power in the lead; unlike Whitney Houston, she could play herself on screen) make the movie for me!