What's Love Got to Do with It?
Love hurts. Music heals.
Some movies feel more necessary than others, and What’s Love Got to Do with It (1993) is one of those films. Directed by Brian Gibson, it tells the story of Tina Turner (Angela Bassett) — not as the icon she became, but as the human being she had to fight to become. It’s a musical biopic, but it's also a survival story, a portrait of a woman dragged through hell by the people who claimed to love her most, and the long, agonizing road to reclaiming herself.
Angela Bassett, playing Tina Turner, delivers one of the great performances of the 1990s. She embodies her fully and was nominated for an Academy Award for the performance. She’d lose to Holly Hunter in Jane Campion’s The Piano. (1993) The precision of her movements, the physicality, the exhaustion that seems to live in her bones — Bassett shows us not just a woman performing for a crowd, but a woman performing to stay alive. Her energy onstage is electric, but it’s the quiet moments that cut deepest: sitting silently in a dressing room, bloodied and alone, or whispering to herself that she’s going to make it, even if no one else believes it yet.
Laurence Fishburne, playing Ike Turner, is chilling without ever becoming cartoonish. He doesn't twirl a mustache — he smiles, he sweet-talks, he shames, he threatens. It’s a portrait of abuse that feels real because it captures how confusing it can be to those trapped inside it. Ike isn’t just a monster; he’s a manipulator, a man who uses love as a weapon because he knows how badly Tina wants to believe in it. Fishburne’s performance also earned an Oscar nomination, but he’d go on to lose to Tom Hanks in Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia (1993). Tough competition that year. Or maybe something else is at play. Who can say!?
What’s Love Got to Do with It doesn’t shy away from the brutality Tina endured, but it also doesn’t define her solely by her suffering. Her strength is given equal weight. There’s a moment, toward the end, where Tina, bloodied and desperate, bolts across a freeway in Los Angeles, dodging cars to escape Ike for good. It’s filmed like a slasher escape — because for her, it is. It would be an unforgettable scene in any movie: it’s hard to believe we got it in a movie about Tina Turner.
The movie also understands the power of music, not just as entertainment, but as salvation. Every song Tina sings feels like it’s been bought with real pain. When she finally belts out the eponymous "What's Love Got to Do with It," you will understand the meaning of a song you’ve probably heard a thousand times.
Maybe that’s why this film still hits so hard. It’s a biopic that’s not about stardom. It’s about the private wars fought behind closed doors, the voices that get buried, the years it can take to remember that you matter. In that sense, it’s not just Tina Turner's story. It’s a story for anyone who has ever had to claw their way back to themselves.
What’s Love Got to Do with It
Written by Kate Lanier; Directed by Brian Gibson
1993
118 minutes
English
Recommended way to watch (at time of publication): Streaming on Hulu
You’ll like this if you like: Selena (1997), Ray (2004),