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By Matt Singer
IFC News

 

[Photo: Don Cheadle in "Talk to Me," Focus Features, 2007]

 

Is a director's primary responsibility to her audience or her subject? Kasi Lemmons, the director of the new biopic "Talk to Me," gets caught between those two poles. People get up in arms when a fictionalized version of real events takes liberties with what actually happened. A film like this puts it in perspective. Had it been a little less accurate, it might have been a much better story. But, then, it wouldn't be truthful.

 

After getting a taste for disc jockeying while behind bars, Ralph Waldo "Petey" Greene (Don Cheadle) managed to get a job spinning records at Washington D.C.'s WOL Radio through sheer determination (and a little bit of bullying). "Talk to Me" tells the story of his heady rise and inevitable fall, largely through his relationship with his friend and boss Dewey Hughes (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who gives the outspoken Greene his big break and uses him, as he puts it, "to say the things he's afraid to say."

 

Cheadle is absolutely magnetic as Greene, particularly when he's loosed on the airwaves of "P-Town," mixing it up with his listeners or bashing targets like Berry Gordy and President Nixon. He's Howard Stern, if Howard Stern were more political and dressed like Superfly. And Ejiofor is a nice foil as the more straight-laced Hughes, particularly in one powerful scene where he busts our expectations about his character and runs the table in a heated nine-ball contest. The screenplay, by Rick Famuyiwa and Michael Genet (who is also Hughes' son), surprises us with its humor, provided in heavy doses by Greene's faithful girlfriend Vernell (Taraji P. Henson, delightful despite her underwritten role). After the initial flush of fame goes to Petey's head, she catches him in bed with another woman with hilariously uncomfortable results.

 

Lemmons follows Greene and Hughes through their early battles with WOL management (personified by Martin Sheen, in a nice supporting turn) through the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King and Greene's successful forays into television and stand-up comedy. But right about the time the Greene-Hughes partnership busts over the direction of Petey's life the movie busts as well, turning into the sort of traditional biopic it had steadfastly avoided being through its first hour. Suddenly the characters lose their focus as they're tossed to and fro by the winds of year-spanning montages.

 

In its second half, the movie is far too focused on cramming in every important event in Greene's life. This is narrative suicide. In one scene Petey and Dewey's careers are on the ascent, and the two plan to take over the world with his act. One montage later, they're miserable. Did we miss something? Lemmons is obligated to include these scenes because they were an important part of Greene's later life. But does it follow that they therefore must be an important part of Greene's movie?

 

If "Talk to Me" was a fictional film about an edgy disc jockey who became a local icon to thousands of people and who counseled them through dark times, it could end there, satisfyingly and succinctly. Straitjacketed by the twists and turns of life, Lemmons must give us more. But this is no documentary and it shouldn't have to act like one. If there wasn't time to properly flesh out these scenes (and short of turning "Talk to Me" into a miniseries, there wasn't), they should have been cut altogether.

 

I disliked a lot of this portion of the movie, but not enough not to recommend "Talk to Me." The cast is uniformly superb (even Cedric the Entertainer makes an impression as sexy late night DJ "The Nighthawk"), the racial issues bubbling around D.C. are handled with palpable passion, and the central relationship between Greene and Hughes crackles with chemistry, both positive and negative. Those scenes alone are enough to make the film a success. Which is why they should have been the whole movie. But biopics don't work that way.