(2007) "Wake up, godamnit!" In Washington, DC, following the announcement of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, riots broke out in neighborhoods of the nation's capital, with black Americans burning their own residences, looting businesses, beating up white people in the streets. "I'm tired of them takin' our leaders," DJ Petey Greene (Don Cheadle) said on the air from WOL-AM, but then he spoke balm to ease and calm: "It's a dark day in America … Talk to me," taking calls from listeners to vent their frustration and anger. "Your city is on fire … our city … this is not what Dr King would have wanted. This ain't it." He urged people in their homes to stay at home, others to go home: "Put your anger away." He played Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come." The next night Petey, director of programming Dewey Hughes (Chiwetel Ejofor), and the hardest working man in America, James Brown, put on a free concert at Georgetown University.

Director Kasi Lemmons's biopic of Ralph Waldo "Petey" Greene opens with Brown's "It's a Man's World" on the turntable at the Lorton Prison in DC, May of 1966. "All this word play so we don't have to face the truth," Petey says to his fellow miscreants in the correctional facility. The con man, who served nine years before his release two years later, gets introduced to Dewey, who's visiting his brother Milo in the joint, and asks for a job at the radio station.

Standing atop a tower of the prison and screaming that the warden has a "little dick," Poochie calls for Petey as the warden watches while guards taking aim at the maniac. Petey agrees to a deal of early release with the warden if he can get Poochie down. Shouting to Poochie, if he doesn't quit acting like a fool and come down, Petey threatens to "tell yo mama." Later Petey boasts to Dewey that he needed only five minutes to get Poochie off the tower, but it took him six months to talk Poochie into going up there.

Back outside in 1968 with his long-time girlfriend and chocolate candybar, Vernell Watson (Taraji P. Henson), he struts into the radio station - "Pete Greene's on the scene" - expecting a job. When Dewey denies he ever promised Petey a spot on WOL, Petey calls him a "white boy with a tan" and begins protesting discrimination on the sidewalk.

In an effort to diffuse the bad publicity, Dewey, who grew up in the Anacostia projects, offers to meet Petey at a pool hall where Petey, full of hubris and himself, challenges the program director to a game of nine ball. The side bet's for $500, but the principal wager is a job at WOL versus Petey's promise to lay off his picketing.

Dewey stresses three rules to his new AM on AM DJ: know your audience; if you talk big, be sure you can back it up; "never underestimate me." Dewey repeatedly sticks out his neck for Petey who raps and rhymes to his audience that he only got an eighth-grade education with a PhD on the streets of P-Town, promising to "give you the sho-nuff."

But after he refers to Motown record producer Berry Gordy as a hustler and a pimp, E.G. Sonderling (Martin Sheen), WOL's owner, whom Petey calls "Blue Blazes," sacks him. Nevertheless, Dewey risks all after overhearing comments from listeners in a bar complimenting Petey and criticizing the station ("C-O-N-spiracy") for snatching him off the air, by bringing Petey back: "I need you to say the things I'm afraid to say."

While making WOL's morning music and talk show into an enormous success, facing down the FCC's concerns about his language on the air, especially "nigga," Petey battles his demons, especially alcoholism and his straying from Vernell, who gets her revenge with The Nighthawk.

Believing Petey can go to the top, Dewey asks permission to manage Petey's career. The baddest stand-up comic (with mustache and 'fro, Cheadle reminded me of the young Richard Pryor) with his special gift of making people angry by speaking the truth gets his own national-broadcast-syndication TV program and an invitation to appear on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.

Long gone from the scene, radioman Ralph Waldo "Petey" Greene was dead at age 53.

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Copyright © 2007 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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