Ralph Waldo "Petey" Greene was only a few months out of prison when, in 1966, he finagled his way into a job as D.J. at WOR, the premier soul station in the Washington D. C. area. With his sometimes inflammatory rhetoric and fired-up delivery, Petey quickly became known as a "truth teller" and the "voice of the people" for the station's predominantly black listening audience. It wasn't long before he was branching out into other areas of the entertainment industry including television and stand-up comedy.
For about the first hour or so, "Talk to Me," directed by Kasi Lemmons, feels like a subdued and considerably lesser version of the far more animated "Private Parts," but then, at about the midway point, the movie hits its stride with the death of Martin Luther King Jr. and Greene's on-air efforts to bring order to a city rent by anger and civil strife. In many ways, Greene's need to always be true to himself and what he stood for prevented him from ever achieving true mainstream popularity, mainly because he refused to play by the rules set down by the middle-brow entertainment establishment (his abortive - nay disastrous - appearance on The Tonight Show is a highlight of the movie).
The ever impressive Don Cheadle slides effortlessly into the role of Greene, while Chiwetel Ejiofor is equally effective as Dewey Hughes, the man who gets Greene his first gig at the station. It is their tumultuous and complex relationship - which often deals with the issue of just how "assimilationist" blacks were supposed to be at that time - that becomes the galvanizing force of the movie.
The temper of the era - spanning from 1966 to Greene's untimely death from liver cancer in 1984 - is effectively conveyed through a canny combination of newsreel footage and re-creations of key events of the time.
For about the first hour or so, "Talk to Me," directed by Kasi Lemmons, feels like a subdued and considerably lesser version of the far more animated "Private Parts," but then, at about the midway point, the movie hits its stride with the death of Martin Luther King Jr. and Greene's on-air efforts to bring order to a city rent by anger and civil strife. In many ways, Greene's need to always be true to himself and what he stood for prevented him from ever achieving true mainstream popularity, mainly because he refused to play by the rules set down by the middle-brow entertainment establishment (his abortive - nay disastrous - appearance on The Tonight Show is a highlight of the movie).
The ever impressive Don Cheadle slides effortlessly into the role of Greene, while Chiwetel Ejiofor is equally effective as Dewey Hughes, the man who gets Greene his first gig at the station. It is their tumultuous and complex relationship - which often deals with the issue of just how "assimilationist" blacks were supposed to be at that time - that becomes the galvanizing force of the movie.
The temper of the era - spanning from 1966 to Greene's untimely death from liver cancer in 1984 - is effectively conveyed through a canny combination of newsreel footage and re-creations of key events of the time.