Not long before Whitney Houston's career takes off in the Sony Pictures musical biopic "Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody," the young singer shares a romantic kiss with her best friend, Robyn Crawford. It's sweet, intimate and relatively brief, but juxtaposed against the epic highs and lows of the Grammy-winning icon's well-publicized life, the deceptively small moment carries a huge significance.
"I love the fact that she loved who she loved and there wasn't a lot of questioning," said Naomi Ackie, who stars as Houston in the decades-spanning film, which openly acknowledges her long-rumored affair with Crawford.
Directed by Kasi Lemmons ("Harriet") from a script by Anthony McCarten, the film aims to do for Houston what the writer's 2018 Oscar-winning "Bohemian Rhapsody" did for Queen's Freddie Mercury, examining her legacy and formative relationships with parents John and Cissy Houston, Arista Records founder Clive Davis, husband Bobby Brown and longtime confidant Crawford, whom she meets as a teenager.
