Keyboard Fantasies: The Beverly Glenn-Copeland Story

There is this young generation that is so excited about this music and it would be selfish of me to sit around going, “I am sorry, I don’t tour,” said Beverly Glenn-Copeland in 2018 while playing his first concerts in many years. He began a new life in his seventies when the Keyboard Fantasies album he had recorded three decades earlier was discovered by a Japanese collector. Combining electronic, folk, and ambient music, the album, which was recorded in a home studio, has excited not only connoisseurs; Copeland was even persuaded to go on tour, which provided an opportunity to do some of the shooting for the film. Despite appearances, however, this is not another Sugar Man–style story—Copeland has led an extraordinary life. The transgender Black artist left the United States in the 1960s, aware that he would not be able to realize his life’s plans there. Posy Dixon’s documentary is, on the one hand, a record of musical fascination and, on the other, a moving, colorful, and sometimes humorous story about searching for one’s own identity.