'Talk to Me': A Political Movie that Lacks Politics

There are two straight-to-the-gut scenes in Talk To Me, the new biopic in which Don Cheadle slam-dunks his portrayal of Ralph Waldo "Petey" Greene, the ex-con, street-sassy, Afro'ed-out deejay who brought black power to the radio in Washington, DC, in the 1960s.

The first occurs the night Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated. Greene, who had fast-talked himself into an on-air job at WOL-AM, goes into the studio to try to calm down the city, which is in flames, as blacks are rioting and destroying their own neighborhoods. "I don't know if I'm more sad or angry," Greene tells his audience. And Greene is walking a line. He pleads with his listeners to resist the urge to strike: "That's your city ... That's not what Dr. King would've wanted." Then he says, "The truth is, if they can do it to him, don't think for a minute they can't cut you down like a dog." But he counsels, "Put away your anger."

When he walks out of the studio, the other African-American employees embrace him. They all looked stunned and exhausted. Then they spot in the corridor the white station owner (played by Martin Sheen) sobbing. Greene and the other blacks are each processing this cataclysmic event, calculating the right proportion of outrage and sorrow. But for the white guy, it's simple: he's pegged the needle at tragedy. This awful event has not brought the two sides of the racial divide together. It has illuminated the gulf between black and white. The station owner has the luxury to feel only grief. Greene and the rest have a more complicated emotional and psychological task. They walk past the station owner, shrug, and go home for the night.

In the other scene-a few years later when Greene has gone national with a television talk show, records, and nightclub appearances-the onetime prison deejay is booked on Johnny Carson's show. This is it, his manager, Dewey Hughes (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor) tells him. Greene has made the big time. It's gonna be Cosby, Pryor ... and Greene. And Greene, as the movie has proved by this point, has the chops (the voice, the acerbic wit, the killer instinct of a social critic) to go one-on-one with these other rising black luminaries.

But minutes after Carson has finished joshing with Bette Midler, Greene hits the stage and stares at the white audience. He doesn't launch into the expected routine. Instead, he tells the crowd, "I'm just an ex-con." And he explains that when he does his radio show for black people, "I know they're laughing with me, not at me." He goes on: "All I see is a room full of white folks waiting to hear some nigger jokes. I have nothing to say to you." He mutters, "sorry" to Carson and walks off the set. His career (as portrayed in the movie) is over. Greene could not take the final step into respectability-that is, the world of white respectability.

These two interactions between white and black America mark the most dramatic interludes in the movie, which was directed by Kasi Lemmons, a rare commodity in Hollywood: an African-American female director. (In 1997, Lemmons directed Eve's Bayou, a film about a black doctor and his family in Louisiana in the early 1960s, starring Samuel L. Jackson.)

But Lemmons, who is 46 years old, was not interested in turning Petey Greene's short life -- he died of cancer in 1984 at the age of 55 -- into a race-driven tale of blacks and whites. She opted to turn it into a different exploration of race, one involving blacks and other blacks. That is, she examines the dilemma often faced by minorities: confront the system or work within it. Talk To Me zeroes in on the face-off between Greene and Hughes, the sole African-American executive at WOL who found and nurtured Greene and who tried to shoehorn him into the realm of establishment acceptability. This makes for a winning movie, but that focus has an unfortunate side effect; Talk To Me is something of a political movie with little politics.