CADILLAC RECORDS – director: Darnell Martin; starring: Adrian Brody, Jeffery Wright, Beyonce

There’s an air of ambition floating around the first twenty minutes of Cadillac Records promising to eschew the familiar terrain of the music bio-pics by attempting to layer several stories at once. Cadillac Records tells the story of “Chess” records, the legendary Chicago record label and studio where the likes of Howlin’ Wolf, Chuck Berry, Etta James and Muddy Waters created some of their most classic hits. Adrian Brody plays Leonard Chess an immigrant’s son who has ambitions of success that would erase the years of struggle passed on by his failure of a father. Jeffery Wright plays blues legend Muddy Waters, a sharecropper who uses his musical talents to escape his doomed life in Mississippi. The two meet up and the like-minded duo from different side of the tracks form a partnership that endures success, death, and addiction.

Writer-director Darnell Martin manages to get a great performance out of Wright as Waters, and as good a performance one can probably get from Beyonce Knowles as Etta James. Knowles doesn’t really possess the rawness needed to play James, but Martin gives Knowles some good bits of dialogue and a flesh and blood subject to play which has eluded her up until this point. The inspired casting of Mos Def as Chuck Berry and Eamon Walker as Howlin’Wolf pays off winningly with both actors capturing the essence of the real men they portray. Unfortunately for Brody he is saddled with the underwritten role of Chess playing him either as a cipher who paid his artists in Cadillac cars rather than cash and royalties or as the father figure/ manipulator of his artists allowing no subtlety or time to see him in any other light.

This is where Cadillac Records starts to falter. Martin starts to get too caught up juggling the different characters that some storylines feel abandoned, most notably Muddy Waters who seems to be the lead in the beginning but gets sidetracked by the Etta James portions. The film deteriorates into an episodic muddle as the film reaches it’s abrupt ending sadly erasing any promise it’s rich subject matter deserves.