THE LAST time we encountered a Hollywood biopic of a record label – Dreamgirls' oblique glide past the Motown legend – poisonous personalities were sweetened and the music was polished into MOR pabulum. Chess Records, the company that marketed the likes of Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters to a mainstream audience, demands a more robust treatment, but, movies being movies, compromises have, again, been made.
Philip Chess, one of two brothers who founded the label, has disappeared and Leonard Chess, played with stick-insect twitchiness by Adrien Brody, is only about 50 per cent as devious as the real thing. The set decoration is far too tidy, and chronology is so compromised that one half expects Waters to tell us that he “woke up this afternoon”.
Never mind all that. Despite its cavalier approach to the facts, Cadillac Recordsis never anything other than an absolute blast.
The story is, admittedly, blandly uncomplicated. Chess, a Chicago scrap dealer and nightclub impresario, sets up a studio and, availing of good luck and better timing, happens upon Berry, Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Etta James and Willie Dixon. Later, when Elvis launches the white response, the label begins to flounder.
What make the film sizzle, however, are the cracking performances and the convincing recreations of the music. Could anybody other than Mos Def convey both the weirdness and the charisma of Chuck Berry? We need not speculate, for the spooky rapper is on hand to add to the myth.
You would probably need two Beyoncé Knowleses to properly recreate Etta James in her heyday, but the one we have here makes a darn fine fist of it. Jeffrey Wright is characteristically serious as Waters and Cedric the Entertainer offers a nice cameo version of Willie Dixon.
The real showcase turn comes, somewhat surprisingly, from the only modestly famous Eamonn Walker. Despite the disadvantage of being raised in Islington, Walker takes on the towering, apocalyptic persona of Howlin’ Wolf and wrestles it into submission. Somebody find this man a lead role.
Directed by Darnell Martin. Starring Adrien Brody, Jeffrey Wright, Beyoncé Knowles, Cedric
the Entertainer, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Eamonn Walker, Mos Def
15A cert, gen release, 109 min ★★★
