Fictional History: What It Was Like to Start Rock ’n’ Roll, Sort Of By STEPHEN HOLDEN Published: April 9, 2010
“Who Do You Love” — a heavily fictionalized screen biography of Leonard Chess, a founding father of rock ’n’ roll, who with his younger brother, Phil, started Chess Records in Chicago — has neither the star power nor the epic sense of itself that infused “Cadillac Records,” the 2008 film on the same subject.
But with an intense, understated lead performance by the wiry, shape-shifting Alessandro Nivola, who physically suggests a more refined Bruce Springsteen, the movie offers a likable, if doctored, slice of rock history at its seminal flashpoint.
Directed by Jerry Zaks, “Who Do You Love” is less raucous, more nostalgic and much smaller-scaled than “Cadillac Records.” As vintage cars slide by, and legendary names are dropped, you sometimes feel as if you are examining rare tintype photos of the South Side of Chicago. The characters in this screenplay by Bob Conte and Peter Martin Wortmann may be flesh and blood and the dialogue persuasive, but the movie’s bits and pieces of rock lore feel carefully parceled out and softened by a pervasive reverence.
There is the obligatory nightclub knife fight, guns appear, payola is dispensed, and drugs and booze are consumed. But the depictions of violence, rage, corruption and dissipation have the feel of historical set pieces. John Sayles’s 2007 film “Honeydripper,” set in rural Alabama in 1950, conveyed a similar aura of being too enraptured with its subject for its own good, although it must be said that given the immensity of rock mythology, such self-consciousness in a nondocumentary may be unavoidable.
The Chess brothers, immigrants from Poland, who inherited a junkyard that they sold to capitalize their musical endeavors, are portrayed as temperamental opposites, with Leonard, the visionary, taking the risks, while Phil (who didn’t appear in “Cadillac Records”) stood back, wrung his hands and felt underappreciated. Despite their differences they were close. Leonard is a wiry, street-smart wheeler-dealer and proto-hipster obsessed with black culture who prefers to go on the road with Muddy Waters to vacationing with his family.
The birth of rock through Chicago blues by way of the Mississippi Delta is a much more complicated story than it emerges in the movie, in which Waters (David Oyelowo) is the primary catalyst, and Bo Diddley (Robert Randolph) the bridge from the blues to rock. In “Cadillac Records” Chuck Berry (Mos Def) was the bridge.
As the film follows the Chess brothers from the 1940s to the late ’50s, it plays fast and loose with time. No dates are given for Etta James’s 1961 hit “At Last,” but it appears moved to the ’50s, without an appropriate adjustment in the style of the arrangement. In “Cadillac Records” Ms. James was memorably played by Beyoncé, who displayed a surprisingly rough-edged soulfulness.
Ivy Mills (Megalyn Ann Echikunwoke), the fictional James surrogate in “Who Do You Love,” is a sultry balladeer who freezes in the recording studio unless she is high on heroin. Leonard takes her as a lover, and, in a desperate attempt to wean her off drugs, locks her in a hotel room for two weeks. The affair nearly cost Leonard his marriage to his wife, Revetta his (Marika Dominczyk).
At Waters’s audition for the house band in the nightclub that Leonard buys with the help of Willie Dixon (Chi McBride), the bass player and songwriter who is his guide to Chicago’s black musical culture, Waters is so poor he has to borrow a guitar. Mr. Oyelowo is very good, but he is no match for Jeffrey Wright’s Waters in “Cadillac Records.” It should go without saying that musically none of the actors in either film can match the originals in raw forcefulness.
Because it arrived over the airwaves, early rock, from doo-wop, to Elvis Presley, to the blues, had the miraculous quality of seeming to emanate from a mysterious source; the original grooves are sacred.
WHO DO YOU LOVE
Opens on Friday in Manhattan.
Directed by Jerry Zaks; written by Bob Conte and Peter Martin Wortmann; director of photography, David Franco; edited by Scott Richter and Anthony Redman; music by Jeff Beal; choreography by JoAnn Jansen; production designer, Carey Meyer; costumes by Christine Peters; produced by Les Alexander, Andrea Baynes and Jonathan Mitchell; released by International Film Circuit. At the Village East, Second Avenue at 12th Street, East Village. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. This film is not rated.
WITH: Alessandro Nivola (Leonard Chess), Jon Abrahams (Phil Chess), David Oyelowo (Muddy Waters), Chi McBride (Willie Dixon), Megalyn Ann Echikunwoke (Ivy Mills), Marika Dominczyk (Revetta), Kevin Moore a k a Keb’ Mo (Jimmy Rogers), Robert Randolph (Bo Diddley), Raheem DeVaughn (Andrew Tibbs) and Ryan Shaw (Billy Breeze).
Sujet: "Who Do You Love" 