I was intro­duced to Williams’ music by my sis­ter, shortly before she died. She was in hos­pice because of her can­cer but she wanted to play me a YouTube playl­ist of Williams songs – his break­through album Make Way for Love had just been released.

Watching the film was mov­ing for me – obvi­ously – because his voice has been pre­cious to me ever since then, but while I was watch­ing I real­ised that the anniversary of her passing – March 2^nd – was approach­ing which meant the anniversary of her play­ing me his music was prob­ably on or around that day I was sit­ting in the cinema.

The film is out now and I recom­mend you go and see it. It’s not a san­it­ised ‘record com­pany approved’ promo for an album – Williams is too goofy and sin­cere and unguarded for that. But the film is about the mak­ing of a record – Te Whare Tīwekaweka which is his first album to be writ­ten and recor­ded in Te Reo Māori.

Williams’ tent­at­ive steps towards the pro­ject – and his own jour­ney into the lan­guage – along­side his con­vic­tion that he can­not not make the record are very relat­able. I’ve heard some tracks from the fin­ished col­lec­tion now and – from memory they are a lot more lush and pol­ished than the ver­sions we hear being recor­ded in that old com­munity hall in Haast.

The ton­al shifts are bipolar in their own way. The road movie bick­er­ing among the gang is often pretty funny but this is a super­hero film that finally acknow­ledges that you can’t punch your way out of trauma, and the deep wells of sad­ness that all the Thunderbolts have is made mov­ing by real act­ors encour­aged to do some real acting.

I was intro­duced to Williams’ music by my sis­ter, shortly before she died. She was in hos­pice because of her can­cer but she wanted to play me a YouTube playl­ist of Williams songs – his break­through album Make Way for Love had just been released.

Watching the film was mov­ing for me – obvi­ously – because his voice has been pre­cious to me ever since then, but while I was watch­ing I real­ised that the anniversary of her passing – March 2^nd – was approach­ing which meant the anniversary of her play­ing me his music was prob­ably on or around that day I was sit­ting in the cinema.

The film is out now and I recom­mend you go and see it. It’s not a san­it­ised ‘record com­pany approved’ promo for an album – Williams is too goofy and sin­cere and unguarded for that. But the film is about the mak­ing of a record – Te Whare Tīwekaweka which is his first album to be writ­ten and recor­ded in Te Reo Māori.

Williams’ tent­at­ive steps towards the pro­ject – and his own jour­ney into the lan­guage – along­side his con­vic­tion that he can­not not make the record are very relat­able. I’ve heard some tracks from the fin­ished col­lec­tion now and – from memory they are a lot more lush and pol­ished than the ver­sions we hear being recor­ded in that old com­munity hall in Haast.

The ton­al shifts are bipolar in their own way. The road movie bick­er­ing among the gang is often pretty funny but this is a super­hero film that finally acknow­ledges that you can’t punch your way out of trauma, and the deep wells of sad­ness that all the Thunderbolts have is made mov­ing by real act­ors encour­aged to do some real acting.