Film

Pioneering radio shock jock Ralph Waldo “Petey” Greene (Cheadle) learned his craft in prison, volunteering as cellblock DJ while serving out a sentence for armed robbery. A hard drinker who’d been bounced from the army for drug abuse, he nonetheless talked himself into an announcer’s job at a black-oriented AM station and quickly established himself as a hero—first on radio and later on local TV—to a large, primarily black working-class audience.

Judging from the whacked-out clips of the real Greene we’ve found on YouTube, the makers of this film stripped a lot of the bark off their idiosyncratic subject even before running him through the wood chipper that is the Hollywood biopic machine. The result certainly isn’t bad: The reliable Cheadle infuses Greene with an affecting blend of bluster and insecurity; Ejiofor provides a nice counterpart as the boojie radio exec who gives Greene his break and later becomes his manager; Henson (Hustle & Flow) does an implausibly good job with her underwritten part as Greene’s sharp-tongued main squeeze.

Direction by Lemmons (Eve’s Bayou, The Caveman’s Valentine) is proficient, and the funky ’70s clothes, hair and period bric-a-brac are used to full effect without shading into parody. But the guy’s real life had to be a whole lot more interesting than this rote reduction suggests.