Top 10 Things What's Love Got to Do With It Got Factually Right & Wrong

Though one of the more joyous scenes in an otherwise somber feature, the hospital sequence is rife with factual inaccuracies. For starters, we’re sure that Tina learning of her stage name over the radio was more cinematic than her reading it on a vinyl copy of one of her songs like she did in real life. Perhaps more egregious, though, is the scene wherein Ike and his friends abscond with a postnatal Tina down to Tijuana, Mexico to get hitched. While they got the locale right, Ike wasn’t actually present during their son’s birth to lobby for such a quick turnaround, nor did the two make things official for another two years in 1962. And don’t even get us started on what else happened in Tijuana, though you can probably imagine.

Raised as a Baptist as shown early on in the film, it was Tina’s introduction to another religion in Buddhism that contributed to her turning her life around. Specifically, it is the chant integral to Nichiren Buddhism, Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō, which she adopts that ingrained in her a deeper autonomy. In English, it translates to “Devotion to the Mystic Law of the Lotus Sutra,” and often Tina would repeat these words for as long as four hours a day when times were particularly tough. There’s some minute details the film gets wrong around this, like how the suicide attempt that preceded it occurred in 1968, not 1974, but we’re willing to forgive such trivialities in lieu of it getting such an important theme right.

Prior to Tina in the climactic scene singing the titular song - more on that later - Ike approaches her backstage and threatens her with a gun. While Tina’s rebuffing of him even then exemplifies her now staunch disposition, that’s not exactly how it happened in real life. While Ike was miffed by her departure and willing to go to extreme measures to rectify it, he never explicitly threatened Tina in person. Rather, Tina reported Ike would send his goons to menace her, going so far as to shoot up the house that she, her sons and her longtime friend were staying at. She was so scared, she resorted to sleeping in a closet. Yeah...

It’s sad to say, but it would seem the Bullock women don’t always have the best taste in men. Following the heartwarming scene of a young Tina - then Anna Mae Bullock - singing in church, we watch as her mother drives away from their Nutbush, Tennessee home never to return. Though not depicted in the film, Zelma Bullock was similarly abused by her husband Floyd, and her fleeing was strictly a result of that. It wouldn’t be long before Floyd fled too, as two years later he remarried and moved to Detroit, leaving Tina and her sisters in the care of their maternal grandmother. She passed away when Tina was sixteen, prompting the talented youth to reunite with her mother in St. Louis.

Let’s go back to the Buddhism part for a minute. In it, she is comforted by her friend Jackie, who ultimately introduces her to the practice. Only, the real person to do this was a friend of Ike’s named Valerie Bishop, as “Jackie” is merely an amalgamation of the various singers making up the Ikettes. And speaking of fictionalized characters, you have Chi McBride’s Fross, depicted as being Ike Turner’s right-hand man. While Ike’s entourage consisted of many men, none went by the name of Fross. Obviously, the film took certain liberties, like fictionalizing some supporting characters so as not to fudge the truth any more when it got in the way of the script.

We’re not gonna lie: Tina singing the titular song to close out the movie is the perfect punctuation on her return to self-actualization. However, it’s not exactly steeped in candidness. Taking place in 1983, the performance is preceded by the announcer hyping it as Turner’s first show at New York City’s The Ritz theater, when in actuality that occurrence took place in 1981. True, she did perform there in 1983 as well, but she didn’t sing “What’s Love Got to Do with It” because that particular track wouldn’t even be recorded until 1984. Sure, plenty of biopics adjust their dates, and we get why, but we’re still gonna play the part of buzzkill when they do.

Tina getting whisked onstage by friends and onlookers at Ike’s show felt like it was fate intervening to make her the person she was born to be. Only in real life, it would seem Tina made her own fate in order to get recognized. Upon being roused by the Kings of Rhythm, Tina approached Ike and asked if she could sing with them. Ike didn’t say no but it didn’t exactly seem like something would materialize out of the encounter either. So Tina took fate in her own hands and grabbed the mic during the band’s intermission. Upon hearing her sing, Ike included her in the rest of the night’s festivities - and the rest, as they say, is history.

If there’s one thing about this movie we wish weren’t true, it’s the amount of physical abuse Turner endured at the hands of her boyfriend-turned-husband in the nearly two decades they were together. Indeed, the scenes depicting domestic violence are easily the most harrowing in the film, as their tempestuous relationship has come to define their time together in the eyes of the world. While Ike would later downplay the severity of his actions, it’s hard to argue with the plethora of substantiated evidence supporting Tina’s claims. According to Tina, it got so bad, that sometimes after beating her Ike would order her to the bedroom, which was, “like rape.” If there’s anything Tina’s time with Ike proves, though, it’s that she’s a strong survivor.

Let’s go back to that hospital scene for a minute. In it, we see Tina give birth to her firstborn by Ike, only the movie fails to mention that Tina already had a son before she and Ike had one together. Completely omitted from the film is the presence of Kings of Rhythm saxophonist Raymond Hill, with whom Tina dated prior to her relationship with Ike. Together they begat Raymond Craig Hill in 1958, who would be renamed Craig Raymond Turner when Ike adopted him in 1962. Though Ike and Tina would raise four boys together, they only had one together biologically, Ronald Renelle Turner, born in 1960.

This is the part of the film where it turns from a story of victimhood into a story of empowerment. Just as seen on screen, the last straw came in 1976 when Tina and Ike got into a violent altercation in a limousine while in Dallas on tour. Upon arriving at their hotel, Tina left her husband with nothing on her but thirty-six cents and a Mobil credit card. It was only a few weeks later that she would file for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences. While she retained a little more from her marriage than the divorce court scene would suggest, she did keep full ownership of her stage name, which she most certainly earned and continues to do justice to to this day.