And both the backers of the movie, which includes the New Zealand Film Commission and the television drama, funded to the tune of $2.46 million by New Zealand On Air's Platinum fund, will be viewing it as our money well spent.
Even if it might seem like something of a double-up. It wasn't really but the two productions inevitably invite comparison.
Mildly entertaining and utterly nostalgic as the talking head-powered doco is, I thought the TV drama, though uneven, was the more engaging.
Though it sure brought out the pedant in me - mainly to do with the soundtrack.
For a programme about a man whose pre-telly days were spent as a professional musician in a run of Maori showbands, the music felt oddly off-key and Pakeha.
That's when it wasn't popping up in the wrong year (John Hanlon's 1973 folkie protest song Damn the Dam for a 1980 scene? The Netherworld Dancing Toys' For Today from 1985 for an early 80s sequence? I could go on ...).
Period touches that didn't always ring true weren't the telefeature's only faults.
Lots of supporting characters intoning to young Te Wehi that it was a Pakeha world and he'd better get used to it made for a few repetitious lumpen scenes.
Case in point. Poor George Henare had to wade in and shout: "Is this what my comrades in the Maori Battalion sacrificed their lives for in the deserts of Africa?" at young Te Wehi and his boarding house mates when he caught them watching 1960s pop show C'Mon on a portable television in the kitchen.
Which made me wonder: did Maori boys' hostels in the late 1960s have portable tellys? And wasn't George a little too old to have fought Rommel?
But once Billy got clear of the man's humble beginnings, it was on to something good.
It was neatly structured, starting with his sad demise but ending on a uplifting moment. And it came with telling resonant scenes - like the one where Billy strikes up a conversation with a glue-sniffing street kid in an alley outside a club he has just played. It might never have happened, but it felt true.
And it was backstage where the performance of Tainui Tukiwaho as James shone.
He might not have quite caught the beaming confidence of James on stage but he was easy to believe as the family man, the shy guy who perhaps didn't stick up for himself as much as he should and the beloved entertainer who couldn't reconcile those humble Maori beginnings with his profile in the Pakeha world.
- TimeOut
