Talk to Me (2007) / Adjust Your Color
Entertaining, sometimes moving, true-ish story about a rags-to-radio star.
Talk to Me (2007). Grade: B-. Adjust Your Color: The Truth of Petey Greene (2008). Grade: C+
Chiwetel Ejiofor is an exec at a struggling radio station. While reluctantly visiting a brother of his in prison, Ejiofor hears a little bit of the prison radio station, being hosted by the boisterous Don Cheadle. They meet, and Cheadle says Ejiofor should give him a job when he’s out. Ejiofor snickers at this.
Pretty soon after, Cheadle is out — he helped talk down an angry prisoner off the roof. (After being the one to convince him to pull the stunt in the first place.) So he shows up at Ejiofor’s radio station, all bluster and bravado, making the uptight Ejiofor furious. Cheadle continues to pester the guy, and the station, until Ejiofor shows up at the bar where Cheadle hangs out and takes him up on a pool gamble. One game of nine-ball. If Cheadle wins, he gets to be on the radio. If he loses, he stops his pestering.
Cheadle happily takes the bet, figuring he’ll wipe the floor with this “Sidney Poitier lookin’ motherf***er.” And Ejiofor, who’s been the model of the “well-spoken” Black man to this point, starts talking a little tougher, a little rougher, and pulling off trick shots left and right. He tells Cheadle that he made money in school doing EXACTLY this — hustling blowhards into taking him for granted, as lacking in street smarts. Then absolutely destroying them at the pool table. Finally, Cheadle shows Ejiofor some respect.
Now, did this scene happen in real life? I dunno. It seems like something that a Hollywood movie would make up. But it’s so much fun, acted so well, that you WANT to believe that it happened. Or, that if it’s not exactly the way things were, it’s the way they ought to have been.
The real-life people who “inspired” this one are the late Petey Greene, a successful/popular radio DJ/TV personality in D.C. from the 60s to the 80s, and his manager, Dewey Hughes. They had a falling out after Greene, who also did stand-up, failed to show up for a high-profile gig that Hughes had landed for him. The movie shows them eventually reconnecting before Greene’s death. This didn’t happen, except for a phone call.
In a story/plot sense, the fact that the movie is probably mostly made up is not a major problem. Cheadle and Ejiofor play their characters so distinctively and so compellingly that you believe in their emotions, if not the individual scenes. But in terms of what the real people feel about it, it’s a little more of a problem. Some of the Greene family were upset at the way the movie was made.
They believed that the movie portrayed Greene as a drunk (he had been, but sobered up near the end of his life), a womanizer (he had been, but settled down later), and omitted his social activist work in the community. They also didn’t like the portrayal of Hughes as such a nice guy (he didn’t come to the funeral, as the movie depicts). And they may have a point about the movie being balanced more towards Hughes’s side of things — one of the writers, Michael Genet, is Hughes’s son.
I don’t know the particulars, and certainly if some guy was a jerk to my family I’d resent a movie showing what a cool guy they were, but I think the film does a good job balancing the talents and faults of the two main characters. It shows that the big comedy appearance that Hughes wanted was really pushing Greene too far, and shows that Hughes learned a lot from Greene, without shortchanging some of Greene’s more wild-side behavior (which he would talk about openly on his TV show).
In any case, the Cheadle/Ejiofor pairing is so perfect that you’ll wonder why it had never happened before, and hasn’t happened since. The two bounce off each other wonderfully.
Cheadle had played small roles in TV/film before his breakout performance as the loyal, but very dangerous “Mouse” in Carl Franklin’s great Devil in a Blue Dress. Ejiofor has played mostly nice, intense characters. I think either one could have done either part here, but Cheadle’s performances are frequently wry and amusing, while “funny” generally isn’t what you think of when you think of Ejiofor.
It’s really a hoot watching Cheadle push Ejiofor’s buttons, all while Ejiofor is sticking his neck out for this guy — the station owner, nice-but-straitlaced Martin Sheen, doesn’t want this crazy dude in the building, much less on the air. Director Kasi Lemmons does a wonderful job having fun with Sheen’s outrage, without making him into an unpleasant racist idiot. (Maggie Betts made that mistake in the otherwise enjoyable courtroom drama The Burial, where every White guy besides Tommy Lee Jones is shown as a bigoted twerp. A lady who started out quite rich in life and was family friends with the Bushes of the White House was maybe trying to prove her coolness by mocking cartoon racism, methinks.)
There’s another character who’s a lot of fun, too — Taraji P. Henson as Cheadle’s longtime girlfriend. When we first meet her, she has a squeaky comic titter, like Judy Holliday or Marilyn Monroe. But later on she gets to play some strong relationship scenes. And she wears the period outfits fantastically, especially the biggest Afro you’ve ever seen in your life.
Cedric the Entertainer’s around, albeit not given to much to do. And he’s in a scene that demonstrates the first half’s one flaw, how it rushes things too much. He’s having a fight with Cheadle at the station, which is played for comic effect, and suddenly the news comes in that MLK has been murdered. It’s a powerful scene — the pain on every performer’s face is tangible. And when Cheadle expresses his heart out on the radio, you believe it would move people. But it’s too quick a scene to put right on top of the Funny Fight, and it feels like Cheadle’s really too new at the station to be covering this on the air. (He’d actually been there almost two years.)
It also ends up being the highlight of the movie — from then on, this is standard biopic stuff. We watch as Cheadle’s career rises, then falls, and we see the breakup that’s cued by Cheadle telling off a mostly White comedy audience. (In real life, Greene just got plastered and skipped the whole thing.) It’s not as fun as the first half — I don’t know how it could be, really. It’s still well-directed by Lemmons and well-shot by Stéphane Fontaine, with too many hand-held shots (particularly outside the radio station) yet not as many as most movies use today.
Adjust Your Color is a short (hour-long) documentary about Greene that aired on PBS’s Independent Lens. It’s narrated by Cheadle, and directed by TV veteran Loren Mendell. The interviews with friends and family members who knew the real Greene are interesting; so’s a member of the Carter administration who went on his show and pushed back against some of his language.
What you’re mostly getting here, though, is the footage of Greene himself, from his TV show Petey Greene’s Washington. And the guy is… he’s QUITE the character. He doesn’t look anything like Don Cheadle, he looks like he’s led a much rougher life (and he had). And he’s all about the bluster, the braggadoccio. Although he’s frequently trying to put it to good use, he is definitely putting on a show. Here’s a clip that isn’t from the movie:
In fact that story about Dorie Miler IS true, although he didn’t shoot down 22 planes, it was more like two. Still awfully brave, though. Sadly he died from a submarine attack later on in the war.
Most of the time, the TV show looks like what would later be the style of “public access cable,” where it’s shot just on one wicker chair, or on a basement sofa (where Greene displays his Emmys; he won two). Even so, you can see why the guy became a major local legend. He’s got energy to spare, until the end, when he gets sick.
It’s currently on Tubi, and a good companion piece for anyone who enjoyed Talk to Me. It’ll give you a good sense of what the man’s performing was all about. He certainly loved to rhyme a lot! Very much like Muhammed Ali. His signature line was “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.”
Talk to Me isn’t the greatest thing either of these actors have done, but it’s the only thing they’ve done together, and a must see for anyone who enjoys these two. You probably aren’t going to learn a lot about the real person Petey Greene, yet you’ll have a good time watching this loosely-inspired version anyways, especially in the first half. And when Cheadle shows up at Ejiofor’s apartment in the middle of the night butt naked (he’s been kicked out of his place after a domestic argument), don’t spend too much time wondering HOW he got from his place to Ejiofor’s naked, without any car keys. Just accept it as Biopic Movie Magic.