“Get On Up” is a movie of uncompromising soul, unadulterated funk and unalloyed joy.

Dazzling, witty and emotional, this warts-and-all musical biography of James Brown rides on the able shoulders of Chadwick Boseman. It turns out that his terrific, if saintly, spin on Jackie Robinson in “42” was just a warm-up act.

On first glance, Boseman suggests little of the pugnacious fireplug “Godfather of Soul.” He's too tall. He's better-looking. But Boseman juts his jaw into a fearsome underbite and utterly masters the spins, splits and sweaty stagecraft of Brown. He becomes, for two hours, “The Hardest-Working Man in Show Business.”

The director of “The Help” and screenwriters with “Edge of Tomorrow” experience deliver a film reverential and self-aware. Boseman, as Brown, turns to the camera, sometimes narrating Brown's business or music ethos in that Third Person way of his, sometimes winking, sometimes leery-eyed with mistrust. Every now and then, he turns to the camera in pain. Other moments betray guilt — a “Yeah, I know I'm misusing my band” or abusing his wife.

The thrill of Boseman's performance is that he never lets this damaged, very human soul lose our interest or empathy. The guts of the performance are contained in his re-creation of Brown's hoarse, Southern-fried slur of a speaking voice. It's so thick you can't make out everything he says or sings. But that is exactly the way Brown was. And we still understand him and feel his pain.

Tate Taylor's film frames Brown's life within the day, in 1988, in which he hit bottom. Stoned, barely coherent and armed, he terrorizes a group of white folks renting a Georgia meeting room owned by James Brown Enterprises. He went to prison for that, but it's a hilarious mishap played for farce here, and it works.

“Get On Up” shows us Brown's trials: the abusive father, the adoring mother (Viola Davis) who abandoned him, the racist Georgia culture he grew up in. Chapters — “1949, Music Box,” “1964, The Famous Flames” — capture singular moments in his story.

Brown fan Dan Aykroyd must have been in hog heaven playing Brown's compliant manager Ben “Pops” Bart. Davis is stunning in just a few scenes, playing a mother who was victim and victimizer, sexual and nurturing, abused and co-dependent.

But “Get On Up” is Boseman's tour de force. He's perfect in concert scenes, where his mastery of the performer is spot-on (he lip-syncs), hilariously playful as he convinces his then-new group, The Famous Flames, to leap onstage and take over the instruments that Little Richard and his band have left on a break between sets.

Taylor uses time-lapse photography to capture the passing years, skipping between the '40s, when young James was raised by Aunt Honey (Oscar winner Octavia Spencer) in a brothel to the '70s, when Brown rode out disco to become the “Godfather of Soul.”

Roger Moore reviews movies for McClatchy News Service.

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