"Idlewild"

Gangsters, showgirls, wowser production numbers -- OutKast's messy, ambitious and extraordinary movie musical has it all ... and soul to spare.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Read more: Stephanie Zacharek, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews

Antwan A. Patton and André Benjamin

Aug. 25, 2006 | In the '50s and '60s, Charles "Teenie" Harris captured the vitality and elegance of Pittsburgh's African-American communities in the photographs he took for the Pittsburgh Courier. These pictures -- of women swathed in fox fur and proper white gloves, of neatly dressed schoolchildren lining up to be inoculated against polio, of a shoemaker standing proudly behind his bench, wearing a dress shirt, vest and tie beneath his apron -- can be found in a wonderful compilation called "One Shot Harris: The Photographs of Charles 'Teenie' Harris." The pictures, of course, say more than words can adequately express, but in his introduction to the book, Stanley Crouch's words capture their essence as well as any could: "What each of those Pittsburgh people realizes is what all of us as Americans need to know, which is that our entire story is always about many stories and that we are connected by the history of our nation and by the things that we have either invented or borrowed or refined in order to live lives as close to what we wish as we can."

Crouch is no friend to hip-hop, but what he wrote about Harris also cuts to the heart of Bryan Barber's ambitious, messy and extraordinary "Idlewild," starring André Benjamin and Antwan A. Patton (also known, respectively, as Andre 3000 and Big Boi), the two members of OutKast. "Idlewild" is a musical, although the album of the same name that's being concurrently released isn't the movie's soundtrack at all: Many of the songs in "Idlewild" come from OutKast's 2003 "Speakerboxxx/The Love Below"; they've been reinvented and reimagined for the movie -- the ballads, in particular, have a silkier, jazzier feel.

That's significant, because a yearning for the past thrums beneath the lush, satiny surface of "Idlewild," which is set, roughly, in Prohibition-era Georgia, although we may as well simply call it a mythical "Then." Benjamin plays Percival, a mortician and aspiring musician. He works with his father (a stately Ben Vereen) at the family funeral home by day and plays jazz piano at night in a club called the Church -- which really is a kind of church, depending on what kind of benediction you're looking for. His lifelong best friend is Rooster, played by Patton, a family man with five kids and a long-suffering wife, Zora (Malinda Williams): At night, Rooster helps his uncle, Spats (Ving Rhames), run the Church, and he sings and dances onstage there too, succumbing to all the temptations that his charm and talent bring his way.

Percival cherishes his Cab Calloway records; Rooster is never seen in anything more casual than an impeccably tailored suit. But Barber (who also wrote the script) and his two stars use the retro feel of "Idlewild" as a mirror held up to today, suggesting how the past informs the present. Before there was bling, there was glamour, and then, as now, making the most of your God-given talents was a way to gain respect within your community and within your heart. "Idlewild" is a wild, sprawling movie, one that's bound to be underestimated and misunderstood. But maybe the best way to read it is to treat it as a dream history, as a testament, to borrow Crouch's words, to the ways that inventing, borrowing and refining can bring us closer to the lives we want to lead -- yet even within that framework, there's no guarantee of happiness.

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