Dolemite is My Name Is an Utterly Irresistible Tribute to Rudy Ray Moore

Conventional wisdom held that a man like Rudy Ray Moore had no chance of ever becoming a movie star, particularly of the kung-fu-fighting, sexpot-ravishing, larger than life folk hero variety when he decided to make the big leap from king of the underground party record (the kind of brazenly filthy comedy LP record stores kept behind the counter so they didn’t get raided by the cops) to blaxploitation hero as the titular star of 1975’s Dolemite.

At forty-seven, Moore was supposed to be way too old. He was too weird looking. He was too short and too squat and not athletic or sexy enough. He couldn’t act. He couldn’t fight. He had no relevant acting experience, very little money and a script that was hilarious for all the wrong reasons in all the wrong places.

Yet Moore became an unlikely blaxploitation icon all the same. Dolemite Is My Name star Eddie Murphy, in sharp contrast, is among our most natural and undeniable movie stars and pop icons. He’s a man who rocketed not just to stardom, not just to super-stardom but to pop culture phenomenon status before he reached his mid-twenties on Saturday Night Live and then with the cinematic assault of 48 Hours, Trading Places and Beverly Hills Cop.

So there’s something a little perverse about this unlikeliest of movie stars being realized onscreen by someone who radiates mega-watt movie star charisma from every pore, who is so devastatingly handsome and funny and undeniably talented that there’s no conceivable way he could have been anything other than an extraordinary show-business success of historic proportions.

Murphy could not have played Moore in his thirties or forties. He needed to age into the role, to know extraordinary failures as well as successes, to lose a little and spend some time out of the public eye so he could come back and convincingly play an underdog you can’t help but root for even when he’s played by one of the biggest winners of the past half century.

In Dolemite is My Name Moore emerges, unsurprisingly, as another of screenwriter Larry Alexander and Scott Karaszewski’s eccentric outsider artist saints. Like Ed Wood and Andy Kaufman before them, the subjects of the duo’s screenplays for Ed Wood and Man on the Moon respectively, he’s a lovable oddball with a pure heart and a big dream attuned to his own unique, cracked frequency who is able to make the world see his warped vision through a combination of inspiration, perspiration and demented determination.

Dolemite Is My Name is another crowd-pleasing, shamelessly formulaic ode to underdog ingenuity and the infectious, “Let’s put on a show!” spirit that unites everything from Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney musicals to The Disaster Artist. Dolemite Is My Name leans into show-business conventions and cliches instead of subverting or satirizing them. It’s a loving, affectionate tribute to a rule-breaking maverick that follows all the rules itself.

Director Craig Brewer’s previous films have all been set in the present but the visual aesthetic of his breakthrough hit Hustle & Flow and its incendiary and provocative follow-up Black Snake Moan was inextricably rooted in the grit and grime of blaxploitation. Brewer is a visceral and tactile filmmaker whose atmospheric movies convey heat and sexuality so viscerally the film stock itself seems to be sweating.

Blaxploitation has long been the spiritual home of Brewer’s movies and the key to his sensibility; with Dolemite is My Name he and his collaborators have created an origin story for one of the greatest bad movies ever made and one of the least likely but most inspired blaxploitation cult heroes.

Brewer should be in his element chronicling the funky beauty and glamour of The Chitlin’ Circuit, 1970s nightclub scene and blaxploitation era. It certainly suits his well-honed aesthetic more than a remake of Footloose, for example, but even there Brewer was able to bend the material to his will, imbuing the very white story of a town that learns that, actually, dancing is good, with his trademark carnal physicality. But visually as well as thematically, Dolemite is My Name feels strangely cleaned up, as if Brewer shot his usual fever dream blaxploitation fantasy and then they added a TV movie filter that made everything seem less distinctive and cinematic.

Dolemite is My Name opens with its star at a low ebb. He’s made it deep into his forties without much to show for it professionally, just a day job at a record store that’s supposed to finance his show business ambitions but that is in terrible danger of becoming a permanent gig.

In desperation, this consummate show-business outsider, who has toiled as a singer and a comedian without much success finds inspiration from someone even further on the fringes of society: a homeless alcoholic who performs rhyming, rhythmic routines rooted in black folklore about larger than life figures like Dolemite and Willie Green.

Moore reinvents himself as a proudly profane nightclub superstar who delights uniformly ecstatic, even orgasmic crowds with his ribald brand of proto-hip Hop storytelling and self-mythologizing. A world full of red lights suddenly turn green as the late bloomer tries to figure out a way to leverage his nightclub success into a career as a successful recording artist despite performing the kind of material more likely to interest vice cops than major label executives.

Dolemite is My Name follows the template of Ed Wood so closely that, if one were to apply the naming traditions of blaxploitation to it (wherein Dracula becomes Blacula and Frankenstein becomes Blackenstein) they’d need to name the movie Bled Blood. Like Wood, Moore proves an unlikely but loving and supportive father/older brother figure to a motley surrogate family of dreamers, outcasts and other show-business aspirants with everything in the way of ambition and hunger and little in the way of experience, most notably Lady Reed (Da'Vine Joy Randolph, in a tender and touching turn), an insecure protege Moore takes under his wing, acting as equal parts supportive father figure, older brother and Svengali.

The temptation with a real-life figure as outrageous as Moore is to go big and bold, to play up the brash theatricality and giddy excess that has made the Dolemite star a hero and an inspiration to multiple generations of Hip Hop heads and bad movie lovers. Murphy instead goes in an antithetical direction.

Murphy surprisingly and poignantly underplays Moore, giving the Godfather of Hip Hop a core of genuine sadness and vulnerability rooted in decades of failure and rejection dating back to an unhappy childhood in Arkansas and the very real possibility that his show business dreams will forever remain decidedly out of his reach.

Moore’s unlikely path to cinematic immortality begins, surprisingly enough, with a screening of Billy Wilder’s very old-fashioned and very white 1974 adaptation The Front Page, whose style of humor is so violently removed from his experiences as a black man in the 1970s that it instills in him a desire to make a movie reflecting the world as he sees it, a wild, outrageous, genre-hopping romp full of profanity, violence, righteous brothers sticking to cartoonish representation of “The Man” and an all-girl Kung-Fu army or two.

To help him realize his creative destiny and write what would become Dolemite, Moore hooks up with Jerry Jones (Keegan Michael-Key), an earnest playwright and actor who wants to use his art and voice to articulate the dignity of the African-American people and uplift his race -- and is understandably flummoxed at being asked to incorporate exorcisms and kung fu into his vision.

For Dolemite’s director Moore scores what, for him and the production, is a relatively big name: D’Urville Martin (Wesley Snipes), whose credits include Rosemary’s Baby and blaxploitation hits like Hammer, Black Caesar, Sheba Baby and Hell Up in Harlem. Unfortunately for Moore and his ramshackle crew, Martin also comes to the production with a big drinking problem and an ego so big it threatens to block out the sun.

Snipes’ performance is revelatory. Dolemite is My Name is Snipes’ comeback movie as much as it is Murphy’s. In a hilarious comic turn, Snipes plays Martin as an unhinged parody of a self-style “auteur” who acts like he’s above the vulgar ridiculousness he’s haphazardly directing but who is only slightly less lost than the rank amateurs he’s working with.

Also like Ed Wood and The Disaster Artist, Dolemite Is My Name gleans huge laughs out of deadpan recreations of exquisitely terrible scenes from the camp classic at its core, Dolemite, as well as its sequel The Human Tornado.

Moore’s improbable but glorious film career broke the mold for what a blaxploitation hero was supposed to look and act like. Dolemite Is My Name fits the same mold as countless other show-business biopics about dreamers taking a chance on themselves and their groundbreaking vision, including Mario Van Peebles’ Baadasssss!, a similarly engaging but slavishly conventional exploration of the making of another seminal black independent film, in this case Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song.

Murphy’s comeback movie is safe, commercial and mainstream to an almost perverse degree but its reliance on formula and cliche is ultimately an eminently reasonable price to pay for a movie that’s as emotionally satisfying and unexpectedly moving as it is explosively funny.

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