"Talk to Me"

This biopic about a '60s-era Washington disc jockey gets to the heart of what being an American ought to mean.

By Stephanie Zacharek

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

Photo: Focus Features

Don Cheadle in "Talk to Me."

July 13, 2007 | As more and more movies get made each year, some of them terrific and some of them lousy, it's easy to be too grateful for the ones that are merely perfectly mediocre. Sometimes I find myself leaving a picture thinking, "Well, that was very well directed" -- only to realize that I barely cared for any of the characters or what happened to them, that even though I could easily fill out a survey detailing everything the filmmakers had done right, they'd fallen down on the most essential thing: allowing the damn thing to breathe. As conscientious moviegoers, we need to be picky about craftsmanship. But we also need to know when it just isn't enough.

Kasi Lemmons' "Talk to Me," a biopic, of sorts, about '60s-era Washington, D.C., disc jockey and community activist Ralph Waldo "Petey" Greene Jr., is an imperfect picture that's alive every minute, a movie that perfectly captures the vibe of a person, a place, a time and a way of being, and even gets, indirectly and without a whiff of sanctimoniousness, to the heart of what being an American ought to mean.

Petey Greene (played here by Don Cheadle) was a high-school dropout who was convicted of armed robbery in 1960 and sentenced to a 10-year jail term. He became the prison disc jockey -- he was allowed to address his fellow prisoners for 20 minutes each morning and night -- and he earned early parole by talking a suicidal inmate down from the top of a flagpole. ("It took me six months to get him to go up there," he later said.)

After Petey's release, he talked his way into a gig at WOL-AM: The program director there, Dewey Hughes (here played by Chiwetel Ejiofor), took a chance on him. "Talk to Me" shows Greene risking the station's FCC license, not to mention its relationship with certain important record companies, by going on the air that first day and spinning a brash, eloquent, street-talking argument for Motown Records' Berry Gordy as a pimp and a thief. According to Petey, Gordy took gifted black performers, trained them to be palatable to white folk, and then sat back to rake in the money -- the sort of thing no black or white person was supposed to be saying in mid-1960s America. The station's owner, E.G. Sonderling (Martin Sheen), is understandably horrified, until it becomes clear that Petey's insistence on "keeping it real" (or, rather, his inability to do anything but) is drawing a massive local following, a largely though not exclusively black audience that's relieved to hear someone addressing the reality of their lives and the problems of their city with such plain-spokenness and unfettered good humor.

"Talk to Me" moves with a slightly uneven gait; it gets off to a leisurely start, when Lemmons might have done better to just set the works off like a firecracker. Lemmons, who also works as an actress, is an interesting and clearly very talented filmmaker who doesn't work nearly enough. (Her previous features include the evocative thriller and family drama "Eve's Bayou" and the uneven but weirdly compelling crime drama "The Caveman's Valentine," two pictures that show an acute visual sense and an affinity for imaginative storytelling.) There were places in "Talk to Me" where I wish she'd taken firmer, more confident control of the material; it slows down too much in places where it needs to crackle.

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