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By STEVE PERSALL, Times Film CriticIdlewild does have a plot and some good acting, but the music is the star.
Idlewild is a movie constantly straddling the line between daring and dumb.
Actually, calling it a "movie" is a bit of a stretch; this is a club mix of other films set in 1930s speakeasies where cool cats perform onstage and gangsters scheme in the wings.
But the music sets Idlewild off on its own whacked orbit, a rush of anachronistic rhythms and rap lyrics set to big band arrangements from Cab Calloway's collection.
Perhaps only the eccentric, Grammy-winning duo of Andre "3000" Benjamin and Antwan A. "Big Boi" Patton - a.k.a. Outkast - would attempt such a monstrous mash of musical eras. Certainly they're among the few who could pull it off without seeming silly.
That's not to say that some parts of the movie aren't silly: a love ballad sung to a corpse in a mortuary, an animated, engraved rooster on a whiskey flask squawking Greek chorus commentary on the plot. There is already enough in Idlewild pegging Bryan Barber's film as something from another planet without such touches. Barber's screenplay often errs on the side of ambition, which isn't a bad place to fail.
The story connecting these musical hybrids is familiar: Percival Benjamin and Rooster (Patton) are childhood friends who chose different life paths. Percival is the quiet one, duty-bound to working in his father's funeral home while slipping out nightly to play piano in Church, a juke joint of extremely ill repute. Rooster runs the club, freely sampling the hootch and hoochies while his wife and children suffer at home.
Ving Rhames plays Spats, a retiring bootlegger offering to sell his business to Church's owner, Sunshine Ace (Faizon Love). Before the deal goes down, Spats' accomplice Trumpy (Terrence Howard) murders them both, with Rooster witnessing from the shadows. Rooster inherits the nightclub and Trumpy's intimidation.
Meanwhile, Percival is attracted to Angel Davenport (Paula Patton), a gorgeous traveling singer Sunshine Ace hired as a headliner. A more thoughtful script would have her coveted by Rooster and Trumpy, but Barker keeps the Percival connection unchallenged. Any other complications among characters would cut into the time allotted for musical numbers.
Idlewild boils down to two elemental questions: Can Rooster keep his nightclub and can Percival get the girl?
The movie becomes a series of music videos padded with the kind of simplistic dialogue and so-so acting evident in "epic" examples since Michael Jackson's Thriller changed the art form.
Benjamin (Be Cool, Four Brothers) has the acting chops to handle this slight drama, but his consistently downcast eyes prevent much audience connection from building. Patton is charismatic, but when he goes eyeball-to-eyeball with a dynamic actor such as Howard, his entire performance blinks.
As a director, however, Barber doesn't miss any beats or flashy images to underscore them. That is his forte as the creative mind behind Outkast's music videos. He still needs work on the conventional stylings necessary in feature-length cinema as opposed to a 4-minute video. Yet that doesn't hamper our enjoyment of Idlewild; when things get dramatically stale we're confident that another sonic explosion with frisky visuals is just around the corner.
Rather than a concept album, Barber and the boyz created a concept movie, a shabby linking of shimmering sounds in episodes designed for BET video rotation. The coolness quotient is off the chart, so any structural deficiencies aren't terribly important. Idlewild is simply a mess you can dance to.
Steve Persall can be reached at (727) 893-8365 or Persall@sptimes.com.
Idlewild
Grade: B-
Director: Bryan Barber
Cast: Andre Benjamin, Antwan A. Patton, Terrence Howard, Paula Patton, Faizon Love, Ving Rhames, Malinda Williams, Ben Vereen, Macy Gray, Cicely Tyson
Screenplay: Bryan Barber
Rating: R; strong profanity, violence, sexual situations, brief nudity
Running time: 120 min.