Dolemite is my name

Dolemite is my Name (Netflix 2019) is a boisterous bio-pic about a blaxploitation impresario, Rudy Ray Moore.  The movie is a vehicle for Eddie Murphy, rated R for raunchy over-the-top language, but, in reality, mild-mannered with a G-rated sensibility.  In its inspirational tone, the film, paradoxically, resembles A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood about Fred Rogers, also a movie dedicated to uplifting the downtrodden -- despite is subject matter, Dolemite is surprisingly sweet, chaste, and inspirational:  it's the story of a group of underdogs banding together to put on a show, a plot that dates back, at least, to the Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney musicals produced in the late 1930's.  After a startling first forty minutes, the movie relaxes into genre, providing the predictable pleasures that films of this sort offer -- the last half of the movie is formulaic and doesn't deviate from the time-tested genre narrative:  the plucky, but resourceful, team of misfits achieves some success and works effectively together to produce their show; at the last minute, complications ensue and the outcome is in doubt -- but, in the end, all is well and the tenacious gang of losers become winners acknowledged by all.  This sort of story is always entertaining and Dolemite is well-executed.  In particular, Eddie Murphy gives an extremely thoughtful performance -- Rudy Ray Moore is desperate for attention and fame, the son of a dirt-poor and abusive Arkansas sharecropper, and, unlike the brash, trash-talking hero that he impersonates as Dolemite, a sort of African-American James Bond in the form of an urban pimp, Moore is sexually reticent, sometimes fearful, and, essentially, a loner.  Despite the crew of misfits that he gathers around him, Murphy's Moore is isolated, often lacking in self-confidence, and his displays of bravado are obviously compensatory for wounds inflicting on him by his impoverished childhood and previous failures.  Murphys performance is surprising and implies a deep core of anxiety only half-concealed by Moore's exuberant braggadocio.

The first half of the film is better than its formulaic second part.  Moore is pitching rhythm and soul records featuring his singing to a radio announcer (Snoop Dog) operating out of a ghetto record store.  The announcer knows that Moore is a failure but he doesn't look down on him -- after all, he acknowledges, he's a loser too,  trapped in the dead end of the sound-studio in the back room of a slum record shop.  An old wino comes into the record store where Moore works -- the man stinks and alarms the other customers, but he's got an engaging schtick.  He can recite the old urban "toasts", rhymed epics like "Shine and the Titanic" and "The signifying monkey".  This sort of poetry is deemed in bad taste by urban Blacks -- it's got a jail-house ring  Moore recognizes the raw power in these old rhymes and he buys some booze and spends time fraternizing with the hobos and winos hanging around a derelict, if once famous, hotel, The Dunbar.  The scenes with the winos are impressively shot and performed -- the old drunks are scary-looking (one of them is missing half his jaw) but the half-improvised rhymes that they recite are funny and have a razor-edge.  Moore gets some flamboyant pimp clothes and a big Afro wig and, carrying a silver-headed cane, goes on-stage at the California Club where he is an emcee to perform (over objection) some of this material.  The crowd is enthusiastic and Moore becomes a minor celebrity performing filthy rhymed proto-raps to a sort of bongo drum accompaniment.  These shows lead to several comedy albums.  Of course, the mainstream media won't touch this material -- it's too aggressively obscene -- and so Moore hosts a house-party, records some routines to live (and very drunk) audience and, then, produces these records under his own label.  (He sells them in brown paper wrapping marked with devil insignia and his first album is called Eat our More Often.)  The records sell like the proverbial hot-cakes and Moore goes on a chitlin-circuit tour.  Belatedly, the White-owned media take interest -- if Black art can turn a profit, the white folks want in on the loot.  Moore produces several records, all of them with a pimp-theme:  he appears naked on the cover surrounded by naked girls. Along the way, he develops a crew of sidekicks, including most notably a big fat woman named Queen Reed.  One night, with his buddies, Moore goes to see The Front Page a movie based on the old screwball comedies of the thirties starring Jack Lemmon, Walther Matthau, and the young Susan Sarandon.  The audience is entirely White and Moore with his buddies can't understand the humor at all -- it's completely incomprehensible to him.  This leads Moore to come up with the idea of making a movie that urban Black audiences would like, something featuring "car chases, explosions, and titties."  Moore mortgages his interest in his comedy recordings which have become very profitable and uses the money to hire some White kids from film school to shoot an urban gangster/pimp film called Dolemite is my Name.  To accomplish this production, Moore commandeers the squalid Hotel Dunbar, steals electricity from a nearby power pole, and shoots the movie guerilla-style using people from the hood -- for instance, his writer is a local playwright with serious aspirations (he gets talked into the movie by Moore's argument that the film will depict the ravages of drugs on the inner city.)  One of the lead actors says proudly that he has been "directed by Polanski" -- his colleagues are quick to remind him that he played an elevator operator in one scene in Rosemary's Baby.   Local girls are recruited to form a crew of Shaolin kung fu "ho's." The production is imperiled when the cameraman, a kid named Nicholas von Sternberg (the son of Josef von Sternberg, the famous director), tells Moore that they have run out of the "short ends" on which they have been filming.  Moore is distraught and about to abandon the project when one of the actors reminds him, surprisingly enough, of the example of John Cassavetes, the director who made his indy productions on a shoe-string budget.  Moore digs deep, goes further into debt, and finishes the movie.  No one will distribute the picture because it is awful in all respects..  Moore then "four-walls" the movie -- that is, rents a theater in Indianapolis for a midnight premiere and promotes the film himself.  The rest of the movie is predictable and I will leave it to your surmise as to how this all turns out.

Most of the performers in the film have a hard-bitten aspect and there are a lot faces in this picture that you don't expect to see in a mainstream Hollywood production.  Most of the movie is convincingly gritty and raw.  It's a great pleasure to hear the old urban "toasts" like "The Signifying Monkey" spectacularly performed by Eddie Murphy.  The presentation of this material is also satisfyingly sophisticated -- Murphy knows that the apparent ease with which streetcorner poets performed this complex material is the result of hard work and practice.  The film shows Moore collecting this material, the writing and rewriting it, adapting the rhymes and combing through the meter while practicing the lines with different cadences and inflections.  Nothing comes easily and everything is the product of intense effort.  Of course, the film's final reel is full of inspirational dialogue -- for instance, Queen Reed, thanking Moore for putting people like her, those who are unconventionally beautiful, on-screen.  Moore himself is paunchy and early reviews of the movie mock his beer-belly -- he performs the sex scenes in the film shot decorously to hide his girth. There's nothing not to like about this film and Murphy's performance is beautifully nuanced.  (At the end of the film, the picture shows us clips from the actual 1975 film My Name is Dolemite.  It's startlingly primitive and raw and, if anything, Murphy and his company in the Netflix movie are much, much prettier than the original players, including Moore who is very "ghetto".  Both the prototype film and its bio-pic successor demonstrate an unsettling aspect of American life -- until the Netflix movie, I had never heard of Rudy Ray Moore and had no idea as to influence on the Black community.)