Bravely sporting its anachronisms as a badge of honor, OutKast’s “Idlewild” dares to transport hip-hop song and dance to a three-ring-circus of a speakeasy in 1930s Georgia. For long stretches, it can seem like an opportunity for 21st Century actors to dress up in 1930s clothes and drive 1930s cars.
This may be the first movie to combine tapdancing, breakdancing, “West Side Story” acrobatics and Ziegfeld-style production numbers. Perhaps the most elaborate dance sequence is saved for the very end, incongruously played over the end credits — when it’s doomed to compete with exiting audience members.
The result is one of the more playful late-summer movies, and one of the most disjointed. For every bravura dance sequence, for every episode in which singing cuckoo clocks or animated drinking flasks threaten to upstage the actors, there’s a love scene or a gangster shoot-em-up so hackneyed that you feel like talking back to the screen.
Andre Benjamin (aka Andre 3000) plays Percival Jenkins, a shy pianist at a nightclub called Church, which is threatened by a gangster takeover. Antwan A. Patton (aka Big Boi), Benjamin’s partner in OutKast, plays the irrepressible Rooster, the club’s manager, bootlegger and charismatic star attraction.
Ben Vereen has a couple of solid scenes as Percival’s mortician father, who disapproves of his son’s budding affair with a gifted singer, Angel (Paula Patton, no relation to Big Boi), who appreciates Percival’s experimental music. Ving Rhames is gone too soon, and so are Macy Gray and Patti LaBelle.
The cast list also makes room for Oscar nominees Cicely Tyson, whose blissed-out “Mother Hopkins” character appears to be visiting from another planet, and Terrence Howard as Trumpy, a suave killer who is never happier than when he’s laughing at his expiring victims. Trumpy could be a one-note villain, yet Howard manages to make him slyly seductive.
Benjamin and Patton claim the characters they play are exaggerations of their off-screen personalities; certainly the movie is a validation of their on-screen chemistry. In the few scenes they share, and even more in the scenes in which they interact with other actors, they demonstrate that they’re born movie actors.
Benjamin can be as spontaneous as he is introverted, and he almost makes Percival’s idealized love for Angela credible. Gregarious and streetwise, Patton’s Rooster is the philandering life of every party, much to the chagrin of his irritated wife and their precocious children. In the childhood scenes that begin the film, Bobb’e J. Thompson and Bre’wan Waddell are delightful as, respectively, the young Rooster and the young Percival.
Written and directed by first-timer Bryan Barber, “Idlewild” makes the most of its relatively modest budget ($27 million), though the impressive cast has to steer past an awful lot of hokum. They’re most alive when they’re dancing, undisturbed by familiar plotting and hoary dialogue and narration. That includes the repetitious and indiscriminate invocation of “all the world’s a stage” to lend coherence and a phony literary quality to the proceedings.