FUNK

We open backstage at a massive Parliament Funkadelic concert. Costumes fly. Stagehands rush. George Clinton, mid 30s, charismatic and commanding, is preparing to emerge as his alter ego, Dr. Funkenstein, and board the glowing Mothership. But he won't start the show without his bassist and spiritual brother, Bootsy Collins. George finds Bootsy hiding in the band's tour bus, paralyzed by imposter syndrome. George reassures him "You the brother I never had" and coaxes him onstage. The Mothership descends. The crowd erupts. The Funk is alive. Cut to George, now bloated, broke, and passed out in a Detroit drunk tank. Decades of excess have left him with no label, no money, and no clear path forward. Bootsy bails him out, but their relationship is strained. George returns to a decaying farmhouse and learns he's weeks away from losing it to foreclosure. As he falls into withdrawal, George is visited by a surreal figure: Dr. Funkenstein made flesh, dressed in red leather and rhinestones. Funkenstein declares George has lost the Funk, and they must retrieve it. George resists but when Funkenstein activates his glowing glass cane, they are sucked into a memory vortex. We flash to Kannapolis, North Carolina, where George is born in a backwoods outhouse behind a juke joint. Raised by his loving but no nonsense mother Julious, George grows up scrappy, funny, and resourceful. The family migrates north to Newark, NJ, where George is bullied for being poor and southern. He learns to hustle selling records, making knockoff hula hoops, and sweeping at a barbershop called Uptown Tonsorial Parlor, where doo wop and R&B play all day. There, George forms The Parliaments a doo wop group with his friends Fuzzy, Grady, Calvin, and Ray. He falls for a local girl named Carol, and soon they're expecting a baby. The Parliaments land a coveted audition with Berry Gordy at Motown. Their harmonies impress, but Gordy delivers a brutal blow: they're "too ugly for Motown." George, crushed but not broken, rejects respectability politics. He tosses the suits, sheds the choreography, and chooses chaos. He begins to envision a new kind of band louder, rawer, weirder. The seeds of P Funk are planted. George evolves The Parliaments into Parliament Funkadelic, recruiting bandmates from all over: Bootsy Collins on bass, Eddie Hazel on guitar, Bernie Worrell from Juilliard on keys, and a rotating cast of Black misfits, musicians, and cosmic weirdos. Their mission--liberate minds and booties. 2 In a surreal extended sequence, the band joins Timothy Leary at Harvard for an LSD study. George hallucinates a magical forest of animals playing jazz, including possums, fruit bats, and frogs playing the drums. The Funk finds him in a rain-soaked naked dance in Harvard Yard, where George is literally transformed into his fully realized self (Eddie Murphy, from this point forward). The band finds its sound and its attitude. Now fully formed, Parliament Funkadelic becomes a movement. Onstage, George is Dr. Funkenstein an alien funk evangelist leading the masses into ecstasy. The band's music is defiant, electric, and laced with sci fi mythology. Offstage, however, chaos reigns. George pays people with counterfeit bills, prioritizes vision over logistics, and slowly loses touch with the people closest to him. George's growing ego and addiction begin to destroy his relationships. Carol is almost arrested for using the fake money he gave her. Bandmates like Fuzzy quit after being underpaid or disrespected. Bootsy walks away, saying he used to take a bullet for George but now George is the one holding the gun. These emotional confrontations land with real pain. Back in 1992, Dr. Funkenstein confronts George with these memories. George resists, blaming his circumstances and insisting he always put the music first. But Funkenstein calls out the truth: George lost the Funk when he stopped connecting with others and got high on his own mythology. As the farmhouse crumbles around him, George sees clearly-funk is not fame, or flash, or even music. It's honesty. Community. Freedom. Joy. It's what he had with Bootsy, with his bandmates, with his family before ego got in the way. In a stripped down, quiet moment, George sits at a keyboard. He plays a few uncertain notes. A beat emerges. A smile spreads across his face. The Funk returns not in a spaceship, but in the simple act of creation. In a fantasy coda, the Mothership returns not as a stage prop, but as a symbol of rebirth. Bootsy joins George. The music swells. Funkadelic is reborn not as a band, but as an idea. An invitation. A state of mind. As the crowd rises to dance, George reborn, reconnected says once more: "Free your mind, and your ass will follow.