"I'll be performing the songs my fans want to hear. This is it – the final curtain call."

The lights dim, the Columbia Pictures logo lady flickers on the huge screen, followed by a sight and sound buildup that could just as easily come from the p.r. department of NASA heralding the next space shuttle. NASA publicists share with the late Michael Jackson the belief that all launches should be loud and proud, that the paying public should feel that they're definitely in a celestial presence.

Michael Jackson's This Is It opens in another darkened theatre as an off-screen voice (director Kenny Ortega, guiding genius behind Disney's High School Musical films) prepares us for Michael's entrance, which involves a high-tech suit contraption which could probably operate on the lunar surface, all-too-fitting for a celestial creature best known for his "Moon Walk."

There are times when a new film has been so overhyped, and one's own internal shit-detector so primed, that if it merely rises above crass mediocrity one feels waves of relief, and is inclined to oversing its distinctly limited merits. This Is It deserves a better fate. Bearing in mind that the material was designed for a very different context – as the backdrop and fireworks for Jackson's scheduled 50-concert gig in London (including, possibly, a Royal audience) – what Jackson and his principal collaborator Ortega (whose artistic birthright includes working with Gene Kelly) have pulled off in this two-hour concert film (culled from hours of rehearsal footage in LA's spaceship-like Staples Center) is rather special, and contains hints that its creator's grandiose vision of his own artistic resurrection might not have been so wrong after all.

The movie unfolds in a series of acts or set-pieces, each of which invoke Jackson's dazzling resume of chartbusting singles and music videos. Rolling Stone ranks Jackson second only to the Beatles and Mariah Carey for chart-topping hits (59): "Beat It," "Thriller," "Billie Jean," "Bad," "Smooth Criminal." Jackson and Ortega re-imagine the Jackson videos that the MTV generation teethed on with a loose-limbed and talented cast of dancers and musicians, who are informed early on that they're "an extension of Michael Jackson." In This Is It 's intimate prologue, "Michael's kids" cite him as the animating inspiration for their fledgling careers, not unlike the way the teenage Jackson had once envisioned his future in the incendiary moves of funk daddy James Brown.

This Is It sparkles when the ferocious energy channeled by the kids seems to re-animate their god, and once again we witness the power of a man-child who practically invented the music video. A highlight comes when Jackson green-screens himself into the eye-line of 40s fatale Rita Hayworth in Gilda, and has his "Smooth Criminal" pursued by Humphrey Bogart. Michael Jackson often seemed caught between his slickly conceived mini-movies for the small screen and his dream to re-conceive Hollywood classics the way The Wiz had re-imagined The Wizard of Oz for an all-black cast, with Michael, barely out of his teens, as the Scarecrow.

The movie is forced by the circumstances of its creation to end on a down note, following Jackson's reprise of "The Man in the Mirror." Ortega slowly damps down the high-energy pyrotechnics to provide a funeral-like coda. Its bittersweet theme is that the King of Pop had been so heartbreakingly close to a once-unimaginable comeback.

Child of ambition

As incisively documented in Rolling Stone 's commemorative issue, Michael Jackson was the Gary, Indiana child born to parents whose musical ambitions had been stifled to raise a brood of nine. Described as a relentless taskmaster, Joe Jackson was always credited by Michael as his first teacher. "He taught me exactly how to hold a mike and make gestures to the crowd, and how to handle an audience." Later, his daddy would hook up with Motown Records founding daddy Barry Gordy, and these tough daddies would turn Michael and his brothers into a pop juggernaut that would smash the walls between "the chitlin' circuit" open to black performers, and the boundless fame and money available to acts that resonated with mainstream white audiences.

The Jackson 5's #1 single "ABC" would have hit my ears from New York's music radio WABC, the same hype pop machine that first played "Little Stevie Wonder" as an impossibly exotic black teen novelty act. During my 1970s apprenticeship in Texas album rock radio, the Jackson 5 would be far too "bubblegum" for our young white listeners. But as a newly out gay man, the Jackson 5 would reach me through the queer "chitlin' circuit" of dance bars like Houston's Bayou Landing and Dallas' Old Plantation.

I missed Jackson's breakout videos, which reached a queer style pinnacle in the 1988 release "Dirty Diana," from the Bad album. In "Dirty Diana," every "bizarre" physical and vocal transformation Jackson had concocted, perhaps in tribute to his friend Diana Ross, came together in an androgynous image that was, for a breathless moment, neither gay nor straight, neither white nor black. Soon Michael Jackson impersonators popped up on reality TV. In This Is It, a corps of super-talented kids, of unspecified orientation, become Michael Jackson collaborators rather than impersonators.

As black film director Tyler Perry recently told 60 Minutes, sometimes the most authentic artistic statement will appear a funhouse minstrel show to your detractors. Perry – who channels a fierce female spirit in full drag, the trash-talking Christian lady Medea – is also haunted by a cruelly demanding father. As This Is It demonstrates, had he lived, Michael Jackson might have continued to redefine mainstream with his own inexpressibly queer spirit.