Muddying the waters

In 'Cadillac Records,' the music's electrifying but the details are murky

From left: Jeffrey Wright as Muddy Waters, Adrien Brody as record executive Leonard Chess, Beyonce Knowles as Etta James. (Photos by Eric Liebowitz)

If, as Muddy Waters once sang, the blues had a baby and they named it rock and roll, then Chess Records was the delivery room. The little record label birthed the overamped all-American yawp known as Chicago blues, exemplified by Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter, and other impolite black men with harmonicas and guitars. Then, just as that sound was making inroads into white teen America, Chess turned around and launched Chuck Berry like a duck-walking nuclear bomb.

It's a hell of a story, and "Cadillac Records" wants to tell it so badly that it threatens to warp the narrative out of recognition. Writer-director Darnell Martin ("I Like It Like That," TV's "Their Eyes Were Watching God") gets the larger point straight - Chicago blues was a black cultural eruption that was strip-mined by white entrepreneurs and the white mainstream - while fudging the particulars. How seriously can you take a movie that pretends one of the Chess brothers doesn't even exist?

That would be Phil, who's still alive and presumably didn't sell Martin the rights to his life. So "Cadillac Records" becomes the story of Leonard Chess (Adrien Brody), a Polish immigrant Jew who all by himself sets up a studio on Chicago's South Side and invites in a Mississippi sharecropper named McKinley Morganfield (Jeffrey Wright). Under the stage name of Muddy Waters, the latter proceeds to blow the roof off the sucker.

The music, appropriately, is electrifying, and the performances on-target (the actors are really singing rather than lip-synching, a risky choice that mostly works). Wright is fairly reined-in as Muddy - the editing flaunts his relentless womanizing more than anything the actor does - but he has harmonica player Little Walter (a live-wire Columbus Short) to act as mentally unstable id to his superego. More threatening is the appearance of the rival bluesman Howlin' Wolf, portrayed with lethally serene calm by Eamonn Walker ("Oz"). Walker's so good, so there, as Wolf, that when the movie glides on by him, you feel the hurt.

But "Cadillac Records" has a lot on its plate: bringing on Mos Def as a high-spirited Chuck Berry and showing how white culture and the singer's penchant for teenage girls brought him low; sketching out the particulars of payola (Eric Bogosian appears as the influential DJ Alan Freed); positing Etta James as Leonard Chess's very own Diana Ross.

Here's where the movie becomes wish fulfillment rather than a dramatization of known events. Even with what appears to be 30 pounds of prosthetic caboose, Beyoncé Knowles (who gets an executive producing credit) in no way, shape, or form resembles the tough, tiny bulldog that James was at this stage of her career. The implication, too, that she was the great love of Chess's life is at odds with the record. But Beyoncé sings the bejesus out of "At Last," and that counts for something - just don't expect the real Etta.

No wonder Wright seems to be pouting, though; "Cadillac Records" has left Muddy Waters and the other bluesmen (including an underused Cedric the Entertainer as songwriter/narrator Willie Dixon) high and dry in its desire to pack it all in. (Another recent, as-yet-unreleased film version of the Chess Records story, Jerry Zaks's "Who Do You Love," doesn't even deal with James.) In fairness, the culture also left these men behind, at least until the British Invasion groups repaid the debt. In this movie's cracked chronology, the Rolling Stones arrive at Chess to record and pay obeisance some three years ahead of schedule.

And still: No Phil Chess. That's like saying Orville Wright was single-handedly responsible for the invention of the airplane. Fifty years on, we're still living with the aftershocks of what Muddy and Wolf invented and the Chess brothers midwived, but it's in the air and not yet on the screen.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to www.boston.com/ movienation.