“Talk To Me” Speaks To Us All

“I'll tell it to the hot, I'll tell it to the cold. I'll tell it to the young, I'll tell it to the old. I don't want no laughin', I don't want no cryin', and most of all, no signifyin'. This is Petey Greene's Washington.”

Don Cheadle is my third-favorite actor behind Sean Penn and Paul Giamatti, so when I saw the trailer for “Talk To Me,” I put it on my list of movies to see. Having once hosted a radio show briefly myself, the premise of Cheadle as jive-talkin’, boundary-pushin’ hustler DJ Petey Greene made the film even more of a draw. When I finally got around to seeing the picture, I wished I had seen it sooner.

While Chiwetel Ejiofor was very good as Dewey Hughes (he’s a Nigerian with a British accent who had to effect American ghetto slang and D.C. beltway vernacular at various times in the film; talk about a potpourri), the James Brown stand-in was incredible, and Taraji P. Henson stole several scenes as Petey Greene’s girlfriend Vernell, this was a Cheadle vehicle through and through. His portrayal of Ralph Waldo Peter Greene was at times moving, hysterical, poignant and mesmerizing.

The flick stopped short of truly breaking through a couple of times, in my estimation. The story never touched on Greene’s charity efforts with Efforts for Ex-Convicts and United Planning Organization, instead choosing to focus on Greene’s role as the ultimate outsider making it in “the man’s world.” The reality is that he eventually grew to use his stature on the airwaves to try to help others like him who never were able to get out of a life of crime; the movie instead showed Greene falling back into his old ways and fighting those who wanted to bring him further into the mainstream (hence the fictional appearance on Johnny Carson’s “The Tonight Show”). I would have liked to have seen a slightly stronger look at Greene’s impact on the community; the film noted that 10,000 mourners showed up at his funeral, but why? Surely there was more about him that made him such an icon than just his on-air personality.

Yet Kasi Lemmons (who is married to Vondie Curtis Hall, who played Sunny Jim Kelsey in the flick) did a terrific job with the story. As one of the few young black female directors in the movie business — she also directed “Eve’s Bayou” — Lemmons took a film that was once slated to star Martin Lawrence as Greene in 2000 and turned it into something of a historical perspective. At times, her choices result in a film that never quite knew what it wanted to be — Comedy? Drama? Biography? Epic? — but on some levels, that is also what made the movie work.

On the whole, I found “Talk To Me” to be a strong, moving film. Maybe it fell just short of being great … and perhaps it never tried to be. Regardless, Cheadle’s performance combined with Lemmons’s direction make for a more than worthwhile movie.