The story is too fragmented to decipher-a sloppily arranged sequence of sketches that's like a who's who without the why. Also along for the ride are Chess' and Waters' women, Revetta ( Entourage's Emmanuelle Chriqui) and Geneva (Gabrielle Union), respectively, who do little other than quietly frown and tolerate their husbands' myriad dalliances. In time, Chess begins assembling his pieces: Howlin' Wolf, played with almost cartoonish ferocity by Eamonn Walker Dixon, who here comes off as nothing more than a sideman Chuck Berry, rendered as a savvy country boy who liked to show gals his ding-a-ling in the backseat of his car and James, who already had a career before Chess signed the tormented torch singer in 1960, not that you'd know it here. Eventually, the two men meet-during a never-happened brawl at the Macomba, instigated by hell-raising harp player Little Walter (Columbus Short)-and form a partnership, then a friendship.
Waters, recorded one day in the field by Alan Lomax (Tony Bentley), reckons he's got a future in the Big City and treads the tracks till he reaches Chicago. Chess, a junkyard owner, dreams of opening a nightclub, which he does: the Macomba Lounge. For all its copious flaws, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story perfectly nailed the trajectory of every single rockudrama that has tarnished a legend's legend-the big bang turned sad whimper.Ĭadillac Records begins with Dixon laying the foundation of the story, introducing us to "one white boy from Chicago" (Chess, first seen mid-coitus) and "one sharecropper from Mississippi" (Waters, tilling the soil). Most gallingly, for a film "based on a true story," there doesn't seem to be a single fact contained within writer-director Darnell Martin's ham-fisted fiction, which renders pre-rock musical history as yet another downer soap opera bloated with smack and sex and premature corpses, as though that's all that defined the period and the people. (Berry has already served as the subject for one of the better rockumentaries: Taylor Hackford's 1987 Chuck Berry Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll.) It's all too much and not enough either make the epic the story deserves or don't bother.
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Still, the parade of famous faces playing famous faces overstuffs the movie with subjects deserving of features but instead treated as footnotes. (He is, however, a central player in Jerry Zaks' Who Do You Love, the other Chess bio that had its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.) There's no Bo Diddley either, a woeful oversight for a film in need of his hubris and humor. In fact, Phil, who was also left out of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame proceedings upon Leonard's introduction as a pioneer in 1987, is never mentioned at all.
The movie is certainly being marketed as a Chess tell-all the soundtrack, due December 5, counts among its offerings Chess standards recut by the film's actors, including Jeffrey Wright's woefully slight version of Muddy Waters' "Hoochie Coochie Man" Mos Def's coy, sly take on Chuck Berry's "No Particular Place to Go" and three tracks by Beyoncé Knowles, whose purr never comes close to approximating Etta James' growl.īut in this version of the tale-told in flashback, with overwrought narration provided by Cedric the Entertainer as Chess producer, session musician and house songwriter Willie Dixon-there is no Phil Chess, only Leonard, played by an actor, Adrien Brody, who, with his anachronistically tousled hair and Forever Fonzie wardrobe, looks as much like Leonard Chess as he does, well, Howlin' Wolf.
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First, a key spoiler: Cadillac Records is not the story of Chess Records, the blues label started in Chicago in 1950 by brothers Leonard and Phil Chess that featured among its stable of artists Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry and Etta James, plus many others who birthed rock 'n' roll.
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