Film

Ah, the race-conscious musical biopic. Cadillac Records, an earnest, raucous but minor film about the trajectory of independent R&B label Chess and its profound impact on rock & roll, will round out a nice DVD box set with Ray and Talk to Me. All three are about how music brought down segregation barriers and gave opportunity, self-respect and wealth to black people—all at a cost, sure, but in a way that turns that hardship into songs of redemption.

As with any movie that re-creates outsize performers, the pleasures of Cadillac Records stem from watching the actors channel their respective icons: Jeffrey Wright delivers a fierce Muddy Waters, Eamonn Walker is downright chilling as Howlin’ Wolf, Beyoncé Knowles conjures Etta James with sass and verve, and Mos Def is delirious as Chuck Berry. (Adrien Brody’s straitlaced Leonard Chess is simply journeyman’s work.) But prodigious mimicry is not the same as an engaging plot, and the boom-bust-aftermath patterns of most pop-culture chronicles is inescapable quicksand for so many filmmakers. Plot points that should shake like a roller-coaster ride just come off as rote recitations of celebrity-lifestyle hazards.

But Darnell Martin’s film does have the charming good fortune to hit theaters only a month after this country’s transformation into an Obama Nation, and the timing might make its familiar themes resonate that much more deeply. Midcentury’s endemic racism seems so completely unfathomable that to see it again, however familiar the tale, seems like a broadcast from another planet.