Cadillac Records Got Their Musical Mojo Working

This feat is made even more impressive and interesting when you reflect that in the same movie season Mr. Wright has portrayed another notable real-life African-American, the former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, in Oliver Stones W. The man is equally credible as a statesman and a bluesman. If thats not range, what is?

Much more than racial typecasting or clever mimicry is at work in these performances. Mr. Wright can hardly be said to bear a strong physical resemblance to Muddy Waters or Mr. Powell or, for that matter, to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whom he played in the HBO film Boycott, or to the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, so brilliantly impersonated in Basquiat.

Rather, Mr. Wright, as protean and serious an actor as any working in American movies, seems to be writing his own version of Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, the literary scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr.s collection of essays on various styles of African-American manhood.

In each case, whether playing a former soldier or a tormented artist, Mr. Wright directs our attention away from the familiar, public face of the character in question toward a private zone where ambition struggles with anxiety, and where what seems to be at stake is nothing less than the integrity and viability of the self. And so, in his Muddy Waters, we see pride, ambition and uncertainty cohabiting with musical genius, sexual appetite and stubborn professionalism.

Cadillac Records is by no means Mr. Wrights film alone, and his work is enriched by the skill and verve of a prodigious ensemble. The film is not thank goodness another dutiful musical biopic, but rather the group portrait of a remarkable, volatile constellation of artists, including Little Walter (Columbus Short), Chuck Berry (Mos Def), Etta James (Beyonc Knowles), Howlin Wolf (Eamonn Walker) and Willie Dixon, the bassist and songwriter who narrates in the mellow, countrified voice of Cedric the Entertainer.

These musical innovators are gathered together promoted, exploited and given shiny new Caddies with heavy strings attached by Leonard Chess (Adrien Brody), a Jewish entrepreneur in postwar Chicago who sees race music as a potential gold mine. That it also turns out to be an agent of wholesale cultural transformation an old song observes that the blues had a baby, and they called it rock n roll does not faze him in the least.

Few subjects are as encrusted with legend, hyperbole and sheer bunk as the history of American popular music, and there will no doubt be pedants who will object to some of the liberties Cadillac Records has taken with the literal truth. At times Leonard Chess seems so stressed out by running the record company bearing his name that you wish he had, say, a brother to share the burden. The real Leonard Chess did, but for now Phil Chess will have to join Nesuhi Ertegun, brother of Ahmet, in the ranks of music industry siblings neglected by Hollywood.

In any case, Ms. Martin, who wrote as well as directed Cadillac Records, does not need to lean too heavily on the historical record, or on the dreary conventions of pop-culture hagiography, because she has a clear and complicated set of ideas about her characters and a deep appreciation of the music they made. It is, sadly, all too rare for a movie about important musicians to pay intelligent attention to the sounds and idioms that make their lives worth dramatizing in the first place.

But in Cadillac Records you hear most of the important advances and developments that defined urban blues in the 1940s and 50s. When Muddy Waters, newly arrived in Chicago from Mississippi, plugs his guitar into an amplifier, a new sonic mutation occurs. Then Chuck Berry comes along, playing in a speedier, country-inflected style that makes him the first major star to cross from the R&B to the pop charts.