Don Cheadle might be at his best when channeling real people. The actor had a career role when he played in the true story of “Hotel Rwanda,” and now in “Talk to Me” he hits another one over the fence.
“Talk to Me” is based on the life of a Washington, D.C., disc jockey named Ralph Waldo “Petey” Greene. Greene was an ex-con who rose to the top in radio in the late 1960s by telling the truth and sticking it to, you know, The Man.
That’s Cheadle’s role. But the movie is equally about Greene’s friend, Dewey Hughes (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who hires him at Washington’s WOL and pushes his career along.
Greene’s rise to fame is the stuff of classic rags-to-riches movies, and “Talk to Me” (while surely fictionalizing some of this) captures that sense of fun. Midway through, its big centerpiece is Greene’s on-air performance the night Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Greene got credit for calming angry crowds with his broadcasts.
The film, directed by the uneven Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”), is best when tracing the tensions between the two friends. Greene is flamboyant and reckless, a showboat with fat sideburns and a self-destructive tendency to tell the truth.
Hughes is a buttoned-down company man who chooses his words carefully, but is inspired to cut loose by Greene’s outrageousness. Their relationship is bookended by two well-written scenes in a pool hall.
Against that, Greene’s longtime companion is less focused – but she’s played by Taraji P. Henson, who was so terrific in “Hustle &Flow,” so she makes an impression anyway. Martin Sheen hits the right note as WOL’s flabbergasted owner, and Cedric the Entertainer and Vondie Curtis Hall chime in as deejays.
After a great start, “Talk to Me” loses steam – but don’t most biopics do that? Thankfully, it has British actor Ejiofor (so excellent in “Dirty Pretty Things”) and Cheadle to carry it along.
Cheadle plays the outlandish Petey without any fake nobility. His Petey is simply “on” all the time, as liable to shoot himself in the foot as to cut to the essentials. It’s a honey of a performance.
Chiwetel Ejiofor (left) and Don Cheadle star in “Talk to Me.”
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