"Ray"

For the stature Charles attained in both life and death as a musical genius and a national treasure, we are not so far advanced that we can take as an everyday occurrence a big Hollywood movie that confirms his achievements. It was only a drop in the bucket ago that "What'd I Say" was banned on the radio, its singer excoriated as one of the savages depraving white American youth.

Similarly, American movies have not advanced so far that we can take for granted a big Hollywood movie in which almost all the roles are played by black actors. Just a few months ago Stanley Kauffmann gave Jamie Foxx the back-of-the-bus treatment by not even naming him in his New Republic review of "Collateral" -- though Foxx is the costar of the movie. And the hero.

Maybe Kauffmann can see fit to mention his name this time. "Ray" is the movie that finally allows Foxx the full flower of his talent. His Ray Charles is such a fully lived-in performance that any questions of imitation vanish. You don't watch him thinking, "I can't believe how close he is to Ray Charles." You watch him as if you're watching Ray Charles. It's Charles' own recordings we hear in the musical numbers, but Foxx's imitation of Charles' speaking voice is uncanny. It begins as a sort of stutter, then words start to come out in little husks, almost without breath. The words gather speed and bubble out -- higher than you'd expect but gently, as if he were half speaking to himself -- before slowing to the insinuating honey drip with which he draws sentences to a close.

It's the voice of a lover, a put-on artist, a player who holds his cards close to the vest. Throughout, Foxx gives the impression of a man whose blindness lets him live -- at least in part -- in his head. His Ray is calculating the distance between where he is and where he wants to be. Foxx flashes Ray's famous smile as the smile of a charmer who knows exactly how to get what he wants, and he uses his voice as if it contained invisible feelers that dart out to take the measure of a situation and retract to feed him information. Those feelers seem to slide around the women in Ray's life, drawing them to him, before he's laid a finger on them.

Foxx plays Ray so that his blindness becomes an emblem of a separateness that already surrounds him like an aura. (Foxx had prosthetic eyelids glued over his own so that, even though he has dark glasses for most of the movie, he acted most of it blind. It's a major miscalculation when Hackford shows us Ray with his eyes open in a dream sequence; for a few seconds the performance goes poof.) The flashes of anguish that suddenly overtake Ray are a cruelty he has to endure alone -- at least until he convinces himself that heroin will ease their visitations.

It's this private, cloistered quality that makes the humor and seductiveness in Foxx's performance so vivid, and that makes the blazing desire to connect that comes through in Ray's music so powerful.

Great as Foxx is, he's not the whole show. One of the joys of "Ray" is that it showcases black actors we get to see much too seldom. Kerry Washington as Ray's wife, B, has one of the most open faces in the movies. And Regina King brings her performance a hard sadness she has not shown before. Aunjanue Ellis has a brittle melancholy as Mary Jane, a backup singer Ray loves and leaves, and the newcomer Sharon Warren has a fierce presence as Ray's mother, Aretha, young, alone and faced with a job that would break any mother's heart: toughening up your handicapped child to prepare him for the world. As members of Ray's band and entourage, there's good character work from sad-faced Clifton Powell, Bokeem Woodbine and the fine actor Harry Lennix.

As the men who guide Ray's music and career, a trio of white actors bring their roles the sly humor of inadvertent hipsters: Richard Schiff as Jerry Wexler; David Krumholtz, whose sleepy affect hides quick comic timing, as the manager who finds his soul mate in the business-savvy Ray; and Curtis Armstrong (best known for the "Revenge of the Nerds" movies) as Ahmet Ertegun. Armstrong's is an immediately ingratiating performance. He plays Ertegun as a music-loving nebbish both amused to find himself head of soul central, and serious about being a good steward of R&B.

As a richly entertaining movie that manages to do justice to a giant figure in American music, while still allowing us to see him as a human being, "Ray" would be welcome in any year. Opening this weekend, it feels even more precious. It would be the easiest thing for many of us to feel alienated from America right now, to see our current government as the sum total of our country. Most of us will never face anything like the combination of personal hardships and legalized prejudice Ray Charles faced, and because of that "Ray" offers hope.

At a time when we need to be reminded of it, "Ray" says that the ignorance America periodically embraces cannot erode the richness, the omnivorous inclusiveness of our culture. "Ray" is about the beauty that lies in blurring the strains of that culture. It's about how one man's musical vision blended separate voices into one voice that let us hear echoes of ourselves. "Ray" celebrates a man who earned the right to make the simplest and most profound declaration: I hear America singing.

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