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Director of photography - Pascal Rabaud

Editor - Anne Goursaud

Music - John Debney

Choreography - Hinton Battle

Production designer - Charles Breen

Producers - Charles Roven and Robert Guralnick

Universal Pictures and HBO Films. 120 minutes. Rated R for nudity, profanity, drugs.

STARRING: André Benjamin (Percival), Antwan A. Patton (Rooster), Paula Patton (Angel), Terrence Howard (Trumpy), Faizon Love (Ace), Malinda Williams (Zora), Cicely Tyson (Mother Hopkins), Macy Gray (Taffy), Ben Vereen (Percival Sr.), Bruce Bruce (Nathan), Patti LaBelle (the Real Angel Davenport) and Ving Rhames (Spats).

One might argue that the greatest weakness of Bryan Barber’s cinematic Outkast vehicle Idlewild is its lack of originality.

Consider the plot, which is a variation on the brothers-drifting-apart theme. In this case, the protagonists are not siblings, but brothers of another sort — two young men of differing social strata and dispositions circumstantially thrown together as boys. Rooster, a fast-talking, wrong-side-of-the-tracks huckster, is the Bad Boy, and Percival, the straight-laced son of a successful mortician, is the Good. Barber, with a helpful voiceover from the adult Percival, takes us on an entertaining montage establishing their childhood bonding over a common love of music — and we soon arrive at the central conflict of the story: their involvement in “The Church,” an idle and wild nightclub heavily invested in bootlegging and gangsterism. Rooster is the wildly popular house entertainer and heir apparent to Spats (the gang lord of the fictional Georgia town of Idlewild) while Percival — something of a fish out of his depth — idly watches from the periphery of the orchestra’s piano bench.

After this basic exposition, it’s not hard to guess where the story is headed. What usually happens when a taciturn, angry psycho-gangster with a gun (Trumpy, “played” by Terrence Howard) gets pushed too far? When one of the heroes (Outkast’s Big Boi, as Rooster) secretly witnesses things he’s not supposed to? When an aspiring-singer cigarette girl gets her big break? When a Bible is given to a gangster on the way to a gunfight? When the second hero, just before he leaves town (Outkast’s other half, Andre 3000, as Percival), takes time to make one last fateful visit to a gangster nightspot? Where do we expect stray shots to go? Who do we expect to pick up the loose gun on the floor? Yes, foreshadowing and literary cliches turn Barber’s rising action into a game of plot-point telegraphsmanship.

Even many of the musical sequences feel like retreads. In particular, Idlewild’s nightclub scene seems lifted from old Morris Day and The Time videos, crossed with Swing Kids. After all, wasn’t Day’s shtick pretty much High Class, jazz-influenced gangster fashion accessories?

To be perfectly honest, Idlewild plays like an S. E. Hinton novel reworked for urban black youths. Hinton’s novels likewise traded on hoary literary clichés, and they pretty much depended on wide-eyed teens gobbling up mythic archetypes as if they were Wonka-esque originalities. Heck, even the Grand Old Man of American cinematic art-housism, Francis Ford Coppola, dabbled in Hinton adaptions with The Outsiders and Rumblefish.

But there are differences.

First, Barber is no Coppola; the former is a first-time director whose prior credits are confined to Outkast videos, while the latter tackled Hintonism in the prime of his career.

Second, Barber’s cast (and Barber’s work with them) is not up to snuff. The boys from Outkast may be mindblowing musicians (I couldn’t possibly be the judge of that), but they have not yet acquired the chops to pull off leading roles in a feature-length film. Andre Benjamin, unlike Denzel Washington (whose speaking voice Benjamin’s resembles), hasn’t learned how to make stillness compelling, and Antwan Patton (that is, Big Boi) only seems comfortable when he’s onstage aping Morris Day. What’s worse, Barber assembles an all-star supporting cast — Cicely Tyson, Ben Vereen, Ving Rhames, Bill Nunn, and Faizon Love, in addition to Howard — and gets either pedestrian or career-worst performances out of them. (Howard’s performace, in particular, is a stinker. He’s a snotty punk with a gun, not a credible villain. I kept waiting for someone to punch him on the snout so he could run home crying to mama.) Coppola, on the other hand, coached solid (if not resume-topping) performances out of leads Mickey Rorke, Matt Dillon, C. Thomas Howell, and Ralph Macchio, while assembling near-legendary ensembles of supporters (Tom Waits, Nic Cage, Dennis Hopper, Emilio Estevez, Tom Cruise, Laurence Fishburne, etc., etc. etc.).

Third, a Hintonesque film — like Coppola’s, or even more “mature” updates like Less Than Zero or The Pope of Greenwich Village — begs for narrative simplicity, not heavy-handed, insecure homages to its influences. Barber’s repetitious references to Shakespeare and constant invocation of De Palma’s The Untouchables — even including, at one point, Sean Connery’s line about bringing “a knife to a gunfight” — almost scream, “Give me some respect! I know literature and film!”

But heck. Don’t critics play the same game? Aren’t my comparisons to Hinton and Coppola just as showy and prententious?

If all I focus on is Barber’s lack of originality, then I suppose the answer is “yes.” But the comparisons are fair (and useful) because they demonstrate that Idlewild’s major weaknesses are not unorginiality, but Barber’s lack of directorial and screenwriting experience: he doesn’t do with Idlewild what Rob Marshall did with Chicago. Big surprise.

But he’s clearly got talent. The opening sequence, for instance, shows great visual and thematic ingenuity in tying together the last century’s three great spectator artforms: live theatre, film, and recorded music. A closeup of the grooves on a phonograph record gives way to a montage of simulated, scratchy 1920’s film stock of Rooster and Percival, which in turn yields to Percival’s Shakespeare-inspired voiceover. The sequence tells us that Idlewild will be a self-conscious, theatrical musical — which it is. Barber explicitly warns us to expect self-conscious theatricality, such as the wacky, inventive sequences in Percival’s cuckoo-clock-infested bedroom, sequences that play out like some hip-hop version of Disneyland’s defunct Tiki Room.

And to be honest, Barber hasn’t made Idlewild for critics raised on Coppola and erudite cinematic adaptations of Theatre for White People. He’s made a movie for Outkast’s fans — young, black, and mostly male. Are the similarities to Hinton’s teen novels accidental? Is it coincidence that Idlewild’s alternately scantily- and un-clad women are either nags, hos, or damsels in distress? Should we be surprised that Idlewild’s residents are all black, that Crackerville is apparently somewhere down the dirt road a piece?

Not at all. Barber actually knows what he’s doing, and for a rookie does a pretty competent job. For young (and particularly black) audiences, Idlewild should be a fine introduction to themes of redemption, independence, tragic love, loyalty, divine appointments, and sacrifice. Wisely, Barber leaves issues of race entirely aside, which might even help the film work for young white audiences, too.

So if we choose to pick on Barber’s lack of originality, maybe we are the problem, not Barber. We expect Hinton to borrow heavily from Dead White Male literary conventions, and we’re fine with that; is it unrealistic to expect otherwise of Barber, simply because he’s black? What kind of box does that put him in, and what kind of pedestal does that put us on top of?

Certainly, this is by no means a great film. But what it tries to do, it manages to do passably well.

For more information on Greg Wright, including his email address, check out his Blogger profile page.