Talk To Me strives to say great things about civil rights, radio in the '60s, but feels like same-ol'

* * 1/2 (out of 5)

I can't remember ever being underwhelmed by a Don Cheadle movie, but this film was not up to his high standards. Some movies are good at hiding their low budgets, but this is not one of them and while it had high ambitions, the skill level of its director and writer were clearly lacking. Imagine taking Good Morning Vietnam, Private Parts and Malcolm X, throwing them in a blender, but having this concoction made by the blaxploitation team that brought us Superfly or Coffy. There were times when the writing and acting were so phony and overdone that I thought I was watching Good Times on TV Land. The usually good Taraji Henson as the girlfriend is especially bad at the overacting. I felt embarassed for her.

Cheadle plays real life Washington, D.C., disk jockey Petey Greene. An ex-con who bullshits his way into a job at the biggest R&B station in 1966 DC. While the town is mostly black, the radio station caters mostly to the whites and definitely to the white advertisers. Even a black station like WOL is run by a white man (Martin Sheen) and has DJs who toe the party line. Petey can only be real to himself and his audience and the locals love him for it. He speaks his mind and while much of what he says makes you laugh, he's not a comedian, a distinction his producer, friend and manager Dewey Hughes fails to make until it's too late.

Petey is often given credit for calming down the angry black people in Washington the night Martin Luther King was shot. Rioting took place in that city and across America that day, but Petey was able to harness that anger and talk his audience into using it in more creative ways. This definitive moment in the movie lacks the power it clearly wants to achieve. In better hands it might have captured it.


The Freditor