'Idlewild:' A Rap Movie With Rapturous Originality

By all rights, "Idlewild," the much-promoted Prohibition-era musical starring the Grammy-winning OutKast, those quirkily space-age rappers from the ATL, shouldn't work. Shouldn't work, wouldn't work, but somehow does work. For all its shortcomings, "Idlewild" also has something that few films can pull off: moments of such cinematic fabulousness, breathtaking dance sequences and idiosyncratic 3-D animation flourishes that we are more than willing to forgive it for all of its sins.

Yes, it's a rap movie in that it's got rappers and rapping and gangstas and enough cartoon-level violence to make Wile E. Coyote blanch. But "Idlewild" takes the rapping actor -- or is it acting rapper? -- genre and melds it with the gangster flicks of the '30s, mixing and matching influences for a startlingly original film.

It has moments of pure beauty: Vintage black-and-white photos suddenly animate, a still life morphing into reel life. And it's got moments of pure whimsy, with music notes that turn into stick figures leaping off the page, and a wall of dancing cuckoo clocks singing backup to Andre "Andre 3000" Benjamin's moody musings about the nature of time.

As scripts go, it's a bit of fluff, cobbled together from bits of flicks gone by -- "Bugsy Malone," "The Cotton Club," "Chicago," "Cabin in the Sky." Blow on it and phwwwwwwwwwttt, it flits away. In many ways it's a two-hour music video, except that for all its fluffiness, its impact lingers long after the Busby Berkeleyesque credit sequence rolls, thanks to the filmmaker's visual innovations and OutKast's funkily eccentric sensibility.

Neither member of OutKast, Benjamin or Antwan A. "Big Boi" Patton, has the acting chops of, say, a Tupac or a Mos Def, but they acquit themselves reasonably. And with a supporting cast that includes Terrence Howard, Cicely Tyson, Ben Vereen, Ving Rhames and Patti LaBelle, we hardly minded.

Written and directed by music video director Bryan Barber ("Hey Ya" and "Roses"), it stars Benjamin and Patton as Percival and Rooster, two childhood pals from different sides of the track in Idlewild, Ga., an idyllic, all-black town where the folks are cast in a pretty, sepia-toned light.

Percival is an introverted piano player, the gawky son of an overbearing and alcoholic mortician (Ben Vereen) who spends way too much time talking to a picture of Percival's dead mother. (Literally dead in the photo, too: She's posed in her coffin, a nod to an old tradition of recording the final moments with a loved one.) Rooster, the son of a moonshine runner, is married with a passel of kids, but he can't resist the ladies. His latest entanglement: Rose (Paula Jai Parker), the mistress of an exceedingly portly gentleman named Sunshine, who owns Church, the juke joint. One night, two events transpire that alter their fates: A beautiful singer named Angel (Paula Patton) joins the club and grabs Percival's heart; then Rooster witnesses Trumpy, played by Howard with an easygoing menace, seize control of the club in a bullet-riddled coup. From there, all sorts of chaos ensues, resulting in an unnecessary pileup of bodies and one truly cringe-inducing encounter with a corpse.

But never mind the plot. It won't hold up to the scrutiny. Better instead to go back to Church, where the chorus girls, with their painted breasts and fire-eating tricks, make the chorines from Fosse's "Cabaret" look like the Rockettes in a Radio City Christmas spectacular. Everything at Church is deliciously, wickedly decadent, from the sweaty bodies intertwining on the dance floor to the leering, cigar-smoking thugs to a pneumatic Macy Gray singing a raspy, raunchy little ditty while the drunken crowd roars.

Then Rooster takes the stage, and that's when things get really interesting, with him and Percival melding rap and swing to a head-nodding, and seemingly period-authentic, effect.

Tony Award-winning choreographer Hinton Battle (a former Washingtonian) plays visual DJ, sampling styles from break dancing to Lindy Hopping to ballet to gymnastics. At times the camera slows down to showcase the dancers' athletic pyrotechnics, stretching out the action in a lyrical slo-mo. It's difficult to shoot dance well, to capture the kinetic pulse of moving bodies in a way that doesn't overwhelm. "Idlewild" does it brilliantly, creating an air of excitement that's rare in film today.

Idlewild (121 minutes, at area theaters) is rated R for cartoonish violence, hoochie-mama nudity, sexuality and a whole lotta cussin'.