Filmmaker Alex Gibney uses archival interviews and performance footage plus highlights of the Broadway production of "Fela!" to tell the story of Afrobeat music pioneer Fela Kuti in tonight’s FINDING FELA!. It’s a clever choice given the at times outrageous tales that lie behind the famous name, highlighting the good and bad sides of an often-controversial man.

Filmmaker Alex Gibney uses archival interviews and performance footage plus highlights of the Broadway production of "Fela!" to tell the story of Afrobeat music pioneer Fela Kuti in tonight’s FINDING FELA!. It’s a clever choice given the at times outrageous tales that lie behind the famous name, highlighting the good and bad sides of an often-controversial man.

When Fela Anikulapo-Kuti died in August 1997, it can definitely be said that Nigeria lost one of its most intriguing and inspirational cultural figures. FINDING FELA! ambitiously attempts to follow the extraordinary trajectory of Fela's life, detailing the emergence of his own brand of Afrobeat, his truly anarchic lifestyle, and his ongoing battles with Nigerian authorities.

Using the making of a Broadway musical as its hook makes the film exceptionally watchable, and Fela’s pretty damn wild life never loses its surprise ingredients. From the time he married 27 young girls in one ceremony to his involvement with a "spiritual guru" who slit throats for party demonstrations the action is freaky and non-stop, and even continued after his death.

But let’s begin at the beginning. Amazingly, given what was to follow, Fela's family wanted him to become a lawyer, and in 1958 he left Nigeria for the United Kingdom, ostensibly to study law and find success in a traditionally “Western” profession like several of his siblings. But many of his close friends interviewed maintain that he never intended to follow through, and that he had made his decision to be a musician early on.

It became clear that he was merely following a means to an end when he arrived in the UK and enrolled in the Trinity School of Music. The trumpet was his instrument, as most of Nigeria's leading bandleaders were trumpeters and more than a few early heroes of his. He has said that it was the discovery of Miles Davis's early recordings with Charlie Parker that strengthened his commitment to the instrument when he began studying in London, though.

Not long after, his musical growth took flight as well as his philosophical and ideological views. The issues he raised as he discussed the lyrics of his songs grew increasingly topical by the early Seventies, and he began the form of public speaking that he termed 'yabis' in which he would excoriate government officials for their inefficiency, or preach a new form of freedom of expression that he equated with the right to smoke 'igbo' (weed). Before a trip to the USA at this time, Fela had neither smoked nor drank. He was a serious and committed musician, definitely no libertine. His new attitude was eventually to contribute greatly towards his confrontations with the Nigerian government, and his public criticisms became increasingly focused on what he considered to be government hypocrisy and the betrayal of national potential.

It was around this time that relationships with his bandmembers became increasingly fractious too, and he began to speak of his musical existence as a religious rather than a purely commercial experience.

He also decided to build his own management team and control the release and performance of his music himself. In the early Seventies, big money record companies had a stranglehold on recording and management of groups in Nigeria, bankrolling watered down versions of US soul and Afrobeat. But as Fela developed into a megastar he sought to gain more coin from his recording contracts by encouraging bidding among the rival companies for his independently recorded tapes. The pressure saw him become a little too informal and careless with his finances though, and some of his musicians broke away when it became difficult for him to pay them regularly.

This was also around the time when he began to expand his team of female dancers and establish a commune in his mother's house at Mosholashi-Idi-Oro. Many young women submitted themselves to a life of virtual enslavement as he preached an ideology of male domination and a lifestyle that was based on his theories of female submission.

Clearly, the genius had passed slowly into madness, and over the following years Kuti remained in denial of his HIV Infection and infected multiple innocent women, who naturally held him in awe. He either did not believe or chose not to believe he had contracted HIV and continued his hedonistic lifestyle even up to the point when his condition had developed into full-blown AIDS alongside many other complications, At the time of his death, his brother Professor Koye Ransome-Kuti, the respected Nigerian Doctor and former Deputy Director General of the World Health Organisation revealed that he was suffering from AIDS, Herpes, Syphilis, Acute Gonorrhea, Chancroid and many more - how he had managed to survive till he did with so many nasties floating around in his system is bloody extraordinary.

Watching FINDING FELA! takes you on a whirlwind trip that's for sure, and as with other documentaries about powerful and talented men with rapidly dwindling sanity, is both inspiring and frustrating in turn.  Either way, it's a good solid tale, and well worth an evening on the couch.