Craig Brewer (2019)
Rudy Ray Moore was ‘an American comedian, musician, singer, film actor, and film producer’ (Wikipedia) and Dolemite his most famous creation. First developed as a persona on Moore’s early comedy records, the fast-talking pimp Dolemite is also the title character in a blaxploitation crime comedy of 1975 and its sequels. His motto: ‘Dolemite is my name and fucking up motherfuckers is my game’. Moore, who died in 2008 at the age of eighty-one, is also known as ‘the Godfather of rap’, thanks to the profanity-rich rhymes that featured on his records. Craig Brewer’s comedy biopic starts in the early 1970s, when Moore (Eddie Murphy), in his mid-forties, is working by day in a Los Angeles record store and by night as a club MC with a desperate, cheesy patter. The film climaxes in 1975 with the Hollywood premiere of Dolemite, where the crowd of Moore’s fans outside the theatre includes a group of enthusiastic young rappers-to-be.
Moore’s life, at least during the period covered by Brewer, is an unlikely success story. Dolemite Is My Name, written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, reflects that but the result, though moderately entertaining, is monotonous. Nearly all the incident is brightly-coloured cartoon and the narrative is one-way traffic. As the shameless hustler hero moves from one outrageous coup to another, his setbacks are – or, at any rate, feel – minor. Eddie Murphy and Da’Vine Joy Randolph, as a single mother who joins his troupe, occasionally express a sense of past struggles (and Randolph even has a brief opportunity to voice them). But Brewer seems to assume his audience wants little more than what Moore says ‘the brothers’ in his audience want from a movie: ‘explosions, car crashes and titties’. Dolemite Is My Name doesn’t explore whether these are enough to satisfy ‘the sisters’ too – it takes that as read.
The hero’s associates also include Jerry Jones (Keegan-Michael Key), who, when Moore first approaches him to do a screenplay, doesn’t want to know – Jerry’s into writing socially conscious theatre for African-American casts. Once he’s reluctantly agreed to sign up, however, Jerry is easily absorbed into the group, his previous aspirations forgotten and Keegan-Michael Key’s witty presence largely wasted. On a visit to a strip club, Moore and his mate Jimmy Lynch (Mike Epps) bump into D’Urville Martin (Wesley Snipes, strenuously camp but still amusing). When they offer him a role in their movie, Martin is offended, reminding them of his pedigree as an actor: he played (he really did) the lift attendant in Rosemary’s Baby. So Moore agrees that Martin can direct Dolemite instead.
I wasn’t expecting a scholarly account of the contemporary black cinema landscape but I was frustrated by not understanding some aspects of this in the plot. When Moore goes with Jimmy and another friend to see a movie, he insists on Billy Wilder’s The Front Page, a current hit (starring Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau and Susan Sarandon). In the theatre, Moore and his pals can’t see what the otherwise white audience finds funny. This is presented as, for Moore, a light bulb moment. The implication is that the entertainment tastes of black movie audiences simply aren’t being catered for. But that’s clearly not the case. When Moore tries unsuccessfully to pitch his project to a film executive, there’s a poster for Foxy Brown on the man’s office wall. Moore’s friends suggest going to see, rather than The Front Page, Shaft in Africa or Blackenstein. As a comic illustration of how jobbing African-American actors of the time may have needed to make the most of their white-movie credentials, D’Urville Martin’s namedrop of Rosemary’s Baby is instructive as well as funny. But why does Moore want to see The Front Page in preference to a hit black movie?
When Dolemite is in the can, Moore can’t find a distributor willing to buy it. For a short time, he returns to touring as a comedian. While in Indiana, he’s interviewed by a local DJ (Chris Rock), who asks about the film and puts him in touch with a local cinema that’s willing to premiere it for a fee. Moore vigorously promotes the event and gets a packed house, which appears to enjoy the movie in the so-bad-it’s-great spirit of Tommy Wiseau’s The Room (see The Disaster Artist). A film company executive (Bob Odenkirk) buys Dolemite for distribution. The reviews are terrible but what do critics know? The Hollywood premiere heralds a commercial triumph. (I’m not sure why the reviews precede the premiere but let that pass.) Craig Brewer plays excerpts from the actual Dolemite over the closing credits that look texturally different from (and crummier than) the rushes from the film-within-the-film he’s shown hitherto. I laughed a few times at Dolemite Is My Name but this story of concocting a piece of cinema designed to please more than to make sense becomes an example of its subject.
23 October 2019
