‘Ice Cream Land’ balances fantasy, reality in making its way to the big screen

On two occasions in “Ice Cream Land,” the new documentary from Columbus artist David Denniston, Ricky “Ice Cream” Jackson breaks down his approach to storytelling.

“If you want to hear fantasy, Ice Cream will give you fantasy. If you want to hear reality, Ice Cream will give you reality,” he says. “It’s not if Ice Cream can handle it. It’s if you can handle it. That’s the question.”

In telling Jackson’s tale from his early years in Memphis through the decades that he has lived as a colorfully outsized presence within Columbus, most of it spent on the South Side, Denniston adheres to this pledge, balancing gut-wrenching biographical detail with more surrealistic visual flourishes, including one scene in which Ice Cream dances in front of a wall of illuminated spotlights. (Animations for the film were done by Frank Lawson, with musician Eric Rollin handling the voiceover narration.)

“Ricky has his favorite sayings, his favorite poems, and I was like, wow, this movie is kind of like that, and we go in and out of his mind. And so, I tried to build off his poetry and create these stop-motion animations to play off,” said Denniston, who joined Jackson for an early September interview at his Franklinton art studio ahead of the public premiere of “Ice Cream Land,” which screens at the Lincoln Theatre at 8 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 17. “And I think that helped balance it, because when I showed it to people, I was worried it was too heavy. … And I tried to keep it to where it’s something that’s still fun to watch, even though it’s got serious subject matter in there, too.”

These more intense moments include the severe schizophrenic episode Ice Cream experienced as a freshman at Central State University-Xenia, which led to a year-long stay in a mental institution, as well as the night that he was attacked on the street by a drug dealer who slashed his throat and left him for dead. And yet, the overall tone of the film is one of joyful resilience, with Ice Cream adopting a worldview that could have been cribbed from Monty Python’s “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.” In discussing several stints he spent incarcerated as a younger man, for instance, Ice Cream refers to prison as “a great vacation spot,” recalling how he was embraced on each occasion by both his fellow incarcerated people and the guards.

“Me being sick and in the hospital and everything, going through all them shots and all that medication and everything I’ve been through,” Ice Cream said, and briefly trailed off. “But God has blessed me, and I just try to stay positive.”

The documentary opens with the filmmaker posing a simple question: “Have you ever been fascinated by a stranger?” It’s this precise impulse that led Denniston to sit down across from Ice Cream more than two decades ago, having first crossed paths with him outside of a downtown barbershop in 2004. Though brief, the interaction left an impression on the artist, Jackson demonstrating what he called “the Ice Cream scoop” – a basketball move that Ice Cream said routinely led to him shaking hapless defenders and dropping in a finger roll for two points. And so, Denniston returned to the barbershop the next day in an attempt to learn the identity of the fashionable, 6’6” man who had pantomimed faking the artist out of his shorts.

“The barber found his number, and … the first scene in the movie is us sitting in that little diner, and me asking [Ice Cream] whether or not he wanted to do this,” said Denniston, who had a decent camera for the time and envisioned making a short documentary as “a fun little project,” never anticipating its creation would stretch out over the next 20-plus years and give root to a lifelong friendship.

In that time, the thrust of the documentary continued to evolve, and in the film’s back end it becomes as much about the support community that has come up around Jackson and includes everyone from his case worker at Southeast Healthcare to the proprietor of Donivan’s Barber Shop, who let Jackson sleep in the shop in those times he was unhoused as a younger man. There’s also Raymone Lewis from Dress One Clothing, who has helped to keep Ice Cream dressed in an array of “out there” suits, as the tailor described Jackson’s signature look.

“I’m glad we didn’t release this back in the day, because I really had to sit with it a while to appreciate that it’s really the community that keeps him going,” said Denniston, who in late 2024 exhibited a series of stunning, large-scale paintings he made of Ice Cream, several of which will be on display at the Lincoln Theatre. “He’s a cool dude, cool backstory, but there’s more to it, and it’s what makes him capable of doing everything he’s doing.”

“They look out for me,” said Ice Cream, who attributed the perseverance with which he is blessed to both the musician Prince (“I listen to Prince every day”) and his late mother, whose presence is felt strongly throughout the film, both in terms of how Jackson carries himself and in the colorful clothes that make up his wardrobe. “I got my dressing from my mother. She bought me my first cashmere coat … when I was 13 or 14, something like that. And it was a brown cashmere coat, and I never forgot that. And she said, ‘Ricky, a lady loves a well-dressed man.’”

It should come as no surprise then that Ice Cream has carefully chosen his outfit for the film premiere, planning to pair a mustard yellow bowler purchased for him by Denniston with a double-breasted white suit, a mustard bowtie, and mustard socks and shoes. “And that double-breast, that double-breast hard,” said Jackson, who will also be pulling up to the Lincoln in the back of a purple 1970 Cadillac DeVille. 

“He’s got family coming in from Memphis, so it’s going to be a really special night,” said Denniston, who acknowledged there were times over the years when some people doubted Ice Cream’s talk of a film being made about him, believing it to be another of his delusions. “There were people who didn’t believe he was really doing a movie. And one time, his brother called from Memphis, like, ‘Is this thing really happening?’ And I felt bad, and it was like, ‘Yeah, it will.’”

“And Dave is great,” Ice Cream interjected. “And when you’re blessed with the talent that Dave’s got, and you are blessed the way I am, together we make an awesome team. They get two different flavors; they get chocolate and vanilla.”