When Petey Greene died of lung cancer in 1984, over 10,000
Washington DC mourners gathered in his honor—the largest gathering of
its kind the city had ever seen, save for the deaths of elected
officials. If you have no idea who Petey Greene was, or what he did to
attract such a devoted following, the biopic Talk to Me aims to
set the record straight.
Talk to Me opens in 1966, when Greene (Don Cheadle) is the
“drive time” DJ at Lorton Reformatory, where the inmates have made a
hero out of Greene, thanks to his sly humor and sharp tongue on the
prison’s PA system. Straight from the penal system, Greene hustles and
cajoles his way into the morning slot at DC’s top R&B station, WOL,
where he captures the hearts and minds of black Washington by “keeping
it real” with straight talk about his own life, politics, and the
intensifying climate on the streets. It doesn’t hurt the film that
Greene’s rise to local celebrity is punctuated by the blistering sounds
of James Brown, Sly and the Family Stone, and a whole host of other
post-Motown soul scorchers.
This first half of Talk to Me is fantastic: Cheadle brings a
gleeful relish to the role, as does Hustle and Flow‘s Taraji P.
Henson as girlfriend Vernell. The dialogue is fast and filthy, the
wardrobe and sets are deliriously funky, and the entire production is
swollen with a smart liveliness and grin-inducing charm.
But after the film’s emotional climax, when Greene matures behind
the mic and eases the city through the riots following Martin Luther
King Jr.’s assassination, director Kasi Lemmons starts painting in
enormously broad strokes, and the movie veers into standard (and
overlong) Behind the Music territory. Alcoholism, professional
falling outs, fleeting fame, redemption—it’s all there, as formulaic as
it is in every Hollywood biopic of the last decade.
Still, it’s hard to have too much ill will for a movie that starts
so fiercely; it’s just too bad that the film, like its subject, peters
out meekly, rather than with the razor-sharp roar that defines its best
moments.