On demand: "Luther: Never Too Much"

What do we know about Luther Vandross going into Dawn Porter's career overview Never Too Much? Not too much, really. That Vandross was one of the most notable American soul voices of the 1980s and 90s, either a streamlined Barry White or an Alexander O'Neal with more consistent songwriting instincts. Those who've read the liner notes will know of his involvement with the group Change, maybe even his 1970s work alongside David Bowie. Anyone with eyes in the MTV era could see that Vandross was an immaculately turned out, approachable sort. Beyond that, however: not too much at all. In its opening moments, Never Too Much gestures towards being a fun night out/in by intercutting different live versions of "Ain't No Stopping Us Now". What follows is in part a concert movie and a commemoration, but it's also been conceived as an education, retracing the steps of a somewhat elusive figure who died too soon; some large part of Porter's project here is to try and fill in the gaps. Vandross's songs initially appear less than helpful in this respect, being varyingly generic odes to love, loss and heartbreak, buffed to a rare sheen by the singer's voice. But the singer was widely interviewed (and apparently a regular on the Oprah show), which gets Porter some of the way in, and he was surrounded by a close-knit, fiercely protective circle of friends, colleagues and collaborators, now only too willing to go on the record about someone they revered - but also someone who was holding a lot back.

The most obvious takehome from Porter's film is that its subject was a quintessential craftsman. Raised on those old Aretha, Supremes and Temptations records, Vandross first broke through as a vocal arranger (even if, one travelling companion notes, "he outsung everybody") before being talentspotted by Bowie, always keeping one eye open for the new and interesting, during the recording of the Young Americans album. Thereafter, this Vandross appears as a faintly Zelig-like figure, found backing up Chic, Sister Sledge and Roberta Flack (opening up a rich seam of songs that sound even better pumped through a cinema sound system), then taking a very Reagan-era detour into adland, singing jingles for Juicy Fruit and Miller Lite. He had the perfect voice to sell anything: smooth, authoritative, aspirational. All he needed now was to sell himself. Vandross had a great product: he'd studied at the feet of masters for so long that the first track he laid down for his debut LP was the film's title song, an enduring, right-out-the-traps dancefloor classic. (The album's cover image - "who, me?" - was its own form of personal statement.) Yet somewhere on the way to somewhere close to the top, the salesman came detached from any stable sense of self. Porter lays it all out: the singer's tendency to eat his feelings, an almost cruelly sharp montage of Vandross describing the various diets he'd been on, the stark visual contrast between the performer at his lightest and heaviest. One reason it's tricky to pin down a mental image of Luther Vandross is that - unlike, say, Prince - he often seemed a physically different performer every time you saw him; the voice was the only constant.

The best music that voice gave rise to was, is and shall forever remain a pulse-racing pleasuregiver and general aphrodisiac: Jamie Foxx, interviewed here, recollects that whenever someone put Luther on, it was on, and I should imagine Jamie Foxx would know about these things. But Porter finds no evidence of offstage romance as Vandross makes his way up the Billboard chart, and in the live footage - even amid his band and often rapturous crowds - this Vandross cuts a faintly solitary, lonely figure. Did we know that Luther Vandross was gay? Was he even gay? His erstwhile backing singers profess they urged the singer to come out, but Vandross resisted making anything clear, possibly as he understood the business he was in, and the loverman image he'd created for himself. The industry had become more receptive of and sympathetic to queer performers - one thinks of Divine and Sylvester, grinding away at the fringes of the post-disco scene - but perhaps hetero listeners such as Jamie Foxx wouldn't have been so inspired to put music by an openly gay man on before galloping towards the bedroom. These were the 1980s, after all: different times. Never Too Much thus aligns with the various Whitney Houston documentaries of recent years, even before Clive Davis turns up, looking more than ever like Mike Reid playing EastEnders' Frank Butcher. Again, the subject is a musician ill-served by the record industry of the 1980s, which merely wanted a flat, shiny, uncomplicated image with which to sell CDs.

Porter's film doesn't have the Whitney story's multiple, crushing traumas - a car crash and a stroke are as bad as it gets - but it may in fact form a more typical study in Black marginalisation: what it suggests is that even someone who appeared perpetually on the charts, and who was on Top of the Pops every other week through most of this viewer's childhood, went finally overlooked, unable as he was to show us who he really was. (An unexpected ally here: Richard Marx, the singer-songwriter who served as Vandross's producer and friend in his final years, and who himself may at some point have been expected to deliver more million-selling "Right Here Waiting"s when what he really wanted to come up with was "Hazard"-like idiosyncrasy.) This isn't, then, one of those hero-worship legacy docs that plays the hits and confirms everything we knew and believed going in. The Luther that Porter leaves us with is a vastly more conflicted figure than we remember, to the extent the filmmaker can weaponise the music in interesting ways: 1988's "Any Love" reframed as a closeted cri de coeur, 1994's note-perfect/deeply dull "Endless Love" - a cover born of a label power-marriage with Mariah Carey - seized upon as the type of musical ventriloquism Vandross submitted to so as to keep his employers happy. Late on, we see Luther rebuffing another inquiry into his personal life: "What I owe you is my music, my talent, my best effort." All three of those are amply showcased, at least, and on one consoling front, the evidence Porter gathers is conclusive: Luther Vandross was really very good at this music lark - so good, in fact, that we may all have taken him for granted for far too long.

Luther: Never Too Much is now streaming via NOW TV.