Dolemite is My Name

I want to believe that Rudy Ray Moore was the decent, er, stand-up guy depicted in the recent Netflix financed DOLEMITE IS MY NAME.  Eddie Murphy plays the comedian turned movie star as near angelic - helping abused women and taking time during a premiere to entertain the crowd (including an overweight, presumably bullied kid) waiting around the block for a 2 A.M. showing of DOLEMITE, his big screen debut.  Always sporting an indomitable spirit even as things are looking grim for his movie to get completed.  In many ways, it's a typical rags to riches story, but the formula is tried and true, and screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski travel it quite well.

Moore is first seen in the early 1970s, toiling in an L.A. record shop, trying to get the store DJ to play the cuts he recorded.  His nightly emcee gig (for a funk band) barely allows him to be funny, and audiences aren't responding favorably.  One day, a vagrant comes into the store with street poetry, good enough for Rudy to break out a tape recorder.  Soon he's fashioned (stolen?) this rather salty comedy material into an act.  Then a record contract, though not without a few roadblocks.  Rudy Ray Moore has an audience, but only, in the words of one executive, "five city blocks wide".  Moore counters that those five city blocks exist in every city.  By then, the young man wants to make a movie, to be immortalized up on that 80' screen.  He's inspired one night while watching Billy Wilder's 1974 remake THE FRONT PAGE, which he and his friends don't find the least bit funny.  Who's making movies for his people? You know, the ones who "wanna hear cussing and see titties"?

RRM gets his record company to finance (by fronting future royalties) a picture, but knows nothing about film making.  He hires USC film students and even gets character actor D'Urville Martin (played with quiet amusement by Wesley Snipes) to direct.  DOLEMITE IS MY NAME settles into its best stretch as we watch this motley crew fake their way through the process.  The screenwriters mined these kind of scenes prior in 1994's ED WOOD.  Moore is an aggressive non-actor and his martial arts "skills" are even worse.  But those things made 1975's DOLEMITE so endearing for many.  It's a wildly vulgar, stupid bit of blaxploitation, originally intended by its screenwriter, Jerry Jones (Keegan-Michael Key), to be a serious social drama.  Mutherfucker, please!

DOLEMITE IS MY NAME is lots of fun.  Sure, it's expectedly laden with montages and hits many show biz cliches.  But the big heartedness and true love for B-movies makes it well worth the time.  Film critics get an expected raspberry.   Murphy, who's suffered his share of bad reviews over the years, probably loved that scene.  And he truly has a most welcome comeback to form here.  Boy, have we missed you! And you too, Wesley.

P.S. - As with many other bios, real life chronology is all but ignored.  Note how there are recreations of scenes from THE HUMAN TORNADO that are passed off as being from DOLEMITE. Pffft.