Cadillac Entertaining, but Swiped From Predecessors Dreamgirls and Ray

In case you had not realized that drugs and sex are often found with rock and roll, director Darnell Martin is here with Cadillac Records—a biopic cataloguing the rise and fall of the historic American music label Chess Records—to remind us.

Leonard Chess, the Jewish record producer played by Adrien Brody, launched modern music legends like Muddy Waters, Etta James, and Chuck Berry into the rock ’n’ roll pantheon. For Cadillac Records (so named because every successful musician at Chess gets a Cadillac), Jeffrey Wright, Beyoncé, and Mos Def respectively assume the roles of these superstars. The film starts with the musicians down on their luck. Chess tries to start a “colored” nightclub, while Muddy plays the Chicago streets for chump change. The stars and producers find each other, and go on to create the riffs and lyrical styles that will power the next generation of American music. Shockingly, Chess Records’ meteoric rise leads its beneficiaries to hedonism and excess, wreaking havoc in the studio and bringing the blues of their music into their own lives.

This musical tragedy is rather humdrum, a straight steal from the Ray and Dreamgirls playbook. Cadillac is also a structural mess. An irritating and unnecessary narration beleaguers the film, and tacky montage shots of newspaper articles and pop charts are similarly irksome—it feels like Martin was too unsure of herself to jettison these clichéd tactics.

Though sometimes hackneyed, strong performances from Wright and Mos Def, along with the rest of the cast, make Cadillac worth the price of admission. Mos Def is mesmerizing as Berry. According to Mos Def, his realistic impersonation came from a considerable amount of study. “I read about Chuck, his autobiography ... other books about him,” Mos Def said. The rapper also spent a considerable amount of time “watching clips of him, listening to the music and the lyrics.” Preparation wasn’t all easy. Mos Def joked about “practicing the duck walk [Berry’s signature dance move], putting unnatural strain on my legs.” The homework pays off. His suave style and sharp wit are spot on. Mos Def almost does a better Chuck Berry than Chuck Berry himself, capturing what Def called the “mischievous” and “subversive” element in the elder musician’s personality.

Martin offers support to this superb acting ensemble by minimizing censorship. The film has an R rating and is much better for it. The visceral sex and copious swearing sharpen the carnality of blues and rock and make the characters far more realistic and relatable. A sanitized PG-13 version of the movie would have been an absolute train wreck. Though lacking the directorial audacity to forgo overused techniques, at least Martin avoided the typical censorship of a mainstream biopic.

The music itself is also irresistible and wonderfully integrated into the film. Listening to James’ “At Last” and Muddy’s “Bad to the Bone” is a real treat, and the actors—who sing all their songs for the movie—do the music justice. Beyoncé’s Etta James tracks are valuable in their own right, and they are worth picking up once the Cadillac Records sound track comes out this month.

The raw blues is so enthralling that, when white rock musicians like The Beach Boys and Elvis start to steal it in the movie, their filching feels like an affront. “I had to research the lawsuits,” Wright said. “I’m listening to a Led Zeppelin song, and I was thinking, wait a second—that’s a Muddy Waters lyric and riff. I hear so many Muddy Waters references now.” Indeed, after witnessing in Cadillac how flagrant the musical thievery was, white rock ’n’ roll is far less appealing.

Cadillac Records is an engaging couple hours of film. It operates, though, much like those white musicians who stole their songs from musicians like Muddy and Berry. Cadillac is taking a pre-established style, cemented by countless other music movies, and not changing much of anything. But the rock ’n’ roll played by those second-generation artists was not half bad, and neither is Cadillac Records.