"Ray"

The arc of the story takes Ray Charles from the time he left Florida for Seattle in the late '40s to his cleanup following a Boston arrest for heroin in 1966. We see, in flashback, the 6-year-old Ray losing his sight to glaucoma after the trauma of watching his little brother drown in a washtub. We see his gigs in Seattle and the early recording sessions where he buried his own style beneath a pleasing mimicry of Nat King Cole. We see Ray on tour getting his first taste of heroin, an affair that would continue for the next 17 years.

We see his encounter with Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun (Curtis Armstrong), who signed him to the label, and the sessions at which Ertegun and the great producer Jerry Wexler (Richard Schiff) prodded him to find his own sound. We see the shocked reaction his melding of gospel and R&B provoked in the black community ("He's crying, sanctified," said blues singer Big Bill Broonzy at the time). We see him courting B (Kerry Washington), the Houston gospel singer he later married, and his longtime on-the-road affair with Margie Hendricks (Regina King), the Raelet who contributed to furious duets with Charles on numbers like "(Night Time Is) The Right Time." We see him leaving Atlantic for ABC-Paramount Records, where he had unprecedented control over his music and for which he was labeled a "sellout" for moving beyond the boundaries of R&B.

Despite the pancaking of years that's inevitable in all movie bios, and despite patches of evasiveness -- ignoring Ray's eventual divorce from B, for instance, in order to make it look like they stayed together -- James L. White's screenplay is hardly a whitewash. The film is skimpy on some subjects, and on others it doesn't match the startling candor of Charles' autobiography, "Brother Ray" (co-written with David Ritz and just reissued with Ritz's new afterword). Here, for instance, is Charles on the civil rights movement: "We had been hearing this bullshit about a Constitution and a Bill of Rights. Now it was time to test the waters to see if the words applied to us as well as the folk with the power and the money."

The film is much more forthcoming about the volatility of Ray's affair with Hendricks and her collapse into alcoholism. And the filmmakers make no attempt to hide that Charles could be a hard man to work for. In the scene where Ray fires a longtime employee for stealing, Foxx plays Ray as doubly remote, hiding behind his dark glasses and his office desk, and the effect is frighteningly cold.

But the real story here is the story of the music, and on that subject, "Ray" gets everything right. By making virtually the first thing Ray plays in the movie a country and western tune, the filmmakers, from the start, clearly understand that Ray Charles' music is about crossing barriers -- musical, cultural, racial. That means that by the time Ray has left Atlantic and is recording with strings and choruses of backup singers, releasing entire albums of country tunes (the first was 1962's seminal "Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music"), the movie has made us understand that the lush sound we're hearing is not the sellout or compromise that Charles' post-Atlantic career still represents to some music geeks, but where his music was headed all along. Almost all great commercial movies operate from this same place -- a place where an artist trusts that he can find a vehicle for his deepest, most personal expression that will also be emotionally accessible to a wide audience.

The recording and performance scenes in the movie are a joy, beautifully layered sequences that make us feel the music as the interplay of personalities, the vagaries of chance and Ray's push to realize the sound he heard in his head. Superbly edited by Paul Hirsch, the sequences manage to break the music down to each performer's contribution and create a rhythm that unifies the disparate bits into a cohesive whole.

Perhaps the reason so few songs are allowed to play out in their entirety is that Hackford wanted to keep things moving. But there are moments -- such as the terrific scene where Ray comes up with "What'd I Say" as a vamp to pad out a show to the contracted length -- when the music is swinging, when Ray and the band are in perfect sync, overjoyed and surprised by the sound they're making, when the faces of the crowd are shining, that you could happily watch for much longer than they are allowed to go on. And Hackford and White complicate our response by not allowing us to forget what fueled at least some of this energy. In one scene, Ertegun and Wexler, in the midst of recording Ray, notice he's developed the full-blown junkie twitch. "But just listen to him," Wexler says. It's one of those appalling and completely sympathetic moments when someone blurts out the unsayable: What if he doesn't sound as good without the junk?

Ray Charles' music didn't depend on dope, and in an odd way Jamie Foxx's performance reminds us that we knew that all along. Those strange bodily movements of Charles', the way his right leg dusted the floor by the side of his piano bench as if looking for purchase, the way he embraced himself in response to applause as if he were hugging the audience to him, the way he held his head back and moved his torso from side to side as if he were about to levitate, are less drug-induced than the body language of a man to whom sound was the most concrete thing: Foxx's Ray undulates to caress the currents of sound rising around him, like musical notes in a cartoon.

Next Page: The full flower of Foxx's talent

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