A story of friendship masked as a biopic, Talk to Me stars Don Cheadle as Petey Greene, a D.C. deejay who talked himself out of prison and into an on-air gig at a successful black-oriented radio station. If Greene was half the showman that Cheadle’s dynamic portrayal makes him out to be—and he was, judging by the clips I’ve listened to—it becomes easy to understand why he became a local sensation. Matching Cheadle in panache, if not intensity, is Chiwetel Ejiofor as Dewey Hughes, the WOL AM program director who gave Greene his start. Where the fast-talking Greene embodied the voice of the street, and favors red polyester suits and the like, Hughes takes his inspiration from Johnny Carson, dresses and speaks conservatively, and doesn’t bother to mask his contempt for the cons and conmen of the black community. In Greene’s words, he’s a “Sidney Poitier-ass nigger sellout.”
The first half of the movie is exciting, funny, and sad. It roughly concludes with the reenactment of the moment in which the WOL staff learn of the death of Martin Luther King. While rioting broke out around the station, Greene went on the air and spoke calmly and passionately. The scene made this well-known, 40-year-old event seem of the moment and put a lump in my throat.
The rest isn’t bad, but Greene was an man of a particular time, and that time was the 1960s, when WOL gave a new outlet to voices of America’s changing racial politics. Greene can now be seen as a pioneer of the talk-radio form, although this is less emphasized. Though he stuck around through the 1970s, he was no longer a pioneer, and the movie loses some steam as it comes to focus more on Hughes, who came to see Greene not only as a friend but as a vehicle for his own ambitions and goals, ambitions not necessarily shared by the deejay. Notwithstanding this, Talk to Me succeeds as a portrait of a time, a place, and character worth remembering.
IMDB link
reviewed 8/31/07
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