There have been documentaries and even a 1986 feature film about DC go-go music, but to Karim Mowatt, none showed the energy of seeing a go-go group live or how the offstage lives of musicians affects what they create. “I used to always look at go-gos and be like, ‘This needs to be on film,'” he says. “‘This needs to be captured somehow.'” His new film, Determine to Crank, is an attempt to do just that.
Determine to Crank is Mowatt’s sixth feature-length film. It tells the story of a fictional band by the same name led by a “talker” named Garvey, who is played by Marcus Wells. Mowatt began attending rehearsals by Wells’s real-life band, Determine 2 Crank, while he wrote a script and created storyboards. He added some new members to the group for purposes of the film—only cast members Valerie Lewis and Kermit Meredith had previous on-screen experience—and wrote a story about a band trying to make it. The group faces internal pressures, like one member’s daughter becoming attracted to a bandmate, and external problems like a fight at a gig, prompting the band members to resolve to take back control of their scene.
I met Mowatt in 2020, when he was my guide to the District’s former prison in Lorton, which was then well on its way to becoming a snazzy development. He’d spent time on the inside there in the ’90s and was working on a documentary that came out in 2022 called Lorton: Prison of Terror. It used personal accounts from former inmates, corrections officers, and family members of people who did time there to tell the history of the long-troubled facility, which closed in 2001.
Mowatt wrote, shot, and edited Determine to Crank in five months, a process that involved creating action sequences like a car chase—he says he got some ideas how to mount a camera on a car by watching YouTube videos—and arranging performances at the Glo Lounge in Shaw. He works construction during the week and did most of the shooting on weekends. “You kind of make time,” he explains when asked how he made this all happen so quickly. He’d email the actors their lines on a Thursday, meet them on location Friday night, then shoot all day Saturday and Sunday. Editing, rewrites, and plans for the next weekend’s shoots would take up many of the weekday evenings that followed.
One aspect of the film that longtime go-go fans may pick up on are the sly references its dialogue makes to other artists. When one character says, “We have to have total control because it’s the essence of what our city is about, he’s nodding to both TCB (Total Control Band) and to Rare Essence. Another character wears Nike Air Raids, a reminder of the ’80s band Ayre Rayde. And so on. “People who are steeped in the scene will really pick up on that and appreciate it,” he says.
The film will get its debut Saturday in Maryland. Only cast members have seen the finished film so far. Mowatt plans to hold more screenings and eventually release it for streaming on Prime and Tubi, where his other films are still available. His next project may be the extremely interesting life story of his twin brother, Kobi Mowatt. If Determine to Crank takes off, he says, he may turn that into a series and “bring in other go-go bands also.”
Determine to Crank will show at 6 PM on Saturday, July 25, at Xscape Theatres, 7710 Matapeake Business Drive, Brandywine.
Andrew Beaujon joined Washingtonian in late 2014. He was previously with the Poynter Institute, TBD.com, and Washington City Paper. He lives in Del Ray.
