Academy Award–nominated director Matthew Heineman’s American Symphony begins in 2022, just as composer Jon Batiste learns he was nominated for 11 Grammys; another summit among many high points in his career. Well known as the bandleader on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Batiste is preparing for a one-night only performance at Carnegie Hall to present “American Symphony,” an orchestral piece intended to modernize the form.
At the same time Batiste’s career is picking up momentum, his life partner, Suleika Jaouad, learns that after a decade-long remission, her cancer has returned. American Symphony chronicles the emotional heights and depths that follow, creating a narrative that’s part love story, and part exploration of the processes and motivations behind two incredible creatives.
Raised in New Orleans in a long line of Louisiana musicians, Batiste is a pianist and singer known for composing modern, eclectic crossover music, fusing jazz, soul, gospel, and New Orleans R&B. He attended Juilliard and graduated in 2011, and his band Stay Human performed with artists like Questlove, Lenny Kravitz, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and more. In 2015, Batiste met Stephen Colbert, who hired him to be the bandleader for The Late Show. He’s won five Grammys, including Album of the Year for We Are (2021), and won an Oscar for co-writing the music on the Pixar movie Soul.
“Some people are hardwired to create,” Batiste told Netflix. “We get energy from writing and performing, creating, and gathering people into a community. We also get energy from being together, the two of us, or being alone. We go through these periods of incubation, creativity, and refinement, incubation, creativity, and refinement. You’re letting your thoughts come to you, you’re observing, you’re creating, then you’re putting it out into the world. Then you see what happens and you refine that process. That’s a way of life and that’s a survival mechanism.”
Jaouad is an author, advocate and motivational speaker. Her New York Times bestselling memoir, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted, chronicles her experience being diagnosed with leukemia at just 22 years old, which she started writing about in a column for the New York Times called “Life, Interrupted,” much of which she wrote from her hospital room at Memorial Sloan Kettering. After 10 years of remission, Jaouad’s cancer returned, and her treatment is documented in American Symphony.
“It feels so eerie to have cancer again after nearly 10 years of remission, and to be getting a second bone marrow transplant — a last resort option and a really risky procedure. It’s a bizarre moment in both of our lives,” Jaouad says in the doc. “My first day of chemo, his 11 Grammy nominations were announced… I honestly don’t know how to hold such extremes.”
However, Jaouad also shares how, in the face of those highs and lows, her relationship with Batiste fortifies both of them.
“Long before we were in a romantic relationship, Jon and I shared a creative language. We both see survival as its own kind of creative act,” she says in American Symphony. “It’s what helps us alchemize the different things that come up in life and transform them into something useful, even meaningful.“
Jaouad says that allowing cameras into the most intimate parts of her cancer treatment was part of keeping her frame of mind intact.
“Illness is something that makes you want to hide,” she says. “But I’ve learned from going through this before that, as safe as it might feel to retreat when something like this happens, there’s value in pushing through that impulse. When we dare to share our most vulnerable stories, there’s a reverberation that happens: Vulnerability begets vulnerability begets vulnerability.”
Director Heineman says that throughout his time with the couple — and through the shifts in the story’s direction — one thing remained the same: “Jon and Suleika are both radically, inescapably authentic. I’ve truly never met people who know themselves so well. And despite all of the points at which they could deviate from being who they are, they both stay radically authentic. That was a beautiful thing to capture.”
For the film, Batiste, who just received six 2024 Grammy nominations, composed an original song, “It Never Went Away.”
Watch American Symphony on Netflix now.
