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Voice of the People: Talk to Me

Don Cheadle in "Talk to Me"

For as troubled as race relations are in America, it can be astonishing to reflect on how far they have come in the past half century, a blip on the timeline of history. Talk to Me on its surface is a biopic about the Washington, D.C. radio host Petey Greene, but it resonates as a portrait of black America at a time of internal tension.

In the early 1960s, Greene (played here by Don Cheadle) was serving a 10-year prison sentence for armed robbery. That was where he discovered a talent for the radio business, the ability to keep up a nonstop flow of talk backed with a reservoir of things he felt needed to be said. After an early release, he parlayed a brief meeting with Dewey Hughes (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a young executive at radio station WOL-AM, into a job as a DJ.

I don’t know how accurate the film’s depiction of Hughes’ introduction to the public airways is: The film was written by Hughes’ son, so I suppose the bizarre battles between first Greene and Hughes and later between them and the station’s management are fundamentally accurate. At any rate, these scenes are also tremendously funny, playing up the differences between the two men: Greene, exuding self-confidence with his dapper outfits (this is a man with a serious wardrobe) and motor mouth; and Hughes, whose role model is Johnny Carson and who finds it incomprehensible that Greene could have a bad word to say about Motown founder Berry Gordy, the epitome of the black businessman.

But get on the air Greene does, in a morning show where he is allowed to talk to listeners and bring his streetwise perspective to the issues of the day. It helps to remember that, in the mid 1960s, mornings were not the most heavily listened to periods.

It also helps to remember that, while this type of talk show is common nowadays, it was rare back then, and pretty much unknown for an African-American audience. The movie doesn’t phrase it this way, but Greene may have been the first “shock jock.” In his case, though, what listeners were shocked by was the voice of a man who shared their experiences, who prided himself on “keeping it real” rather than promoting the middle-class dream embodied by his bland peers. In his finest moment, he takes to the airwaves on the night of Martin Luther King’s assassination, helping to dispel rioting that could have been much worse than it was.

Directed by Kasi Lemmons (Eve’s Bayou, The Caveman’s Valentine), Talk to Me would be worth seeing simply for Cheadle’s performance, which is as good as anything this terrific actor has ever done: You just can’t take your eyes off him. But it does a few unusual things, too. Cheadle plays Greene as a man who is not as confident as he thinks he is. His success astounds and confounds him; he doesn’t quite know what to do with it. His triumph is that he gets the job that is perfect for him; his tragedy is that he aims for more.

And the film refuses to make the success-oriented Hughes a cardboard villain. That may be less than surprising given that Talk to Me was written by his son; still, it’s to the film’s credit that it portrays two men from the same background who took different paths to success without belittling either. In the era covered by the film, from the mid 1960s to the late 1970s, the successes of the Civil Rights era started to bring black Americans out of their assigned status as second-class citizens. With change comes tension, and the relationship between Greene and Hughes is partly a metaphor for the struggle within black communities to shed old roles without losing their souls in the process. By capturing some of the texture of an era that isn’t easily written down, Talk to Me shows the value of movies as windows into history, even so recent a history as this.