My beautiful wife and our precocious children were off to a neighboring state for an extended trip to her mom’s, so I immediately cranked up a movie they would never have watched — Dolemite is My Name. A biopic starring Eddie Murphy about an oddball cultural figure from the ’70s, it mystified and repelled me most of the way. Eddie does a masterful job playing a mediocre comedian who has a sudden turn of fortune when he adopts a rhythmic, profanity-laced patter while dressed in outrageous pimp style. Eddie curses so much in his own act, and I didn’t know the subject of the movie, Rudy Ray Moore, actually existed, so I thought it was just Eddie being Eddie in a pimp suit and wig.
But Moore did exist, in living color, with colorful language and colorful clothing, though it’s confusing, because he attained prominence with his alter ego, Dolemite. Moore won cult status with Blacks across the country (and sold a bunch of records) with his chanty, rhymy comedy routine. (A number of rappers say that routine was a key influence for them.) He then managed to produce several blaxploitation movies that were successful despite terrible production and nonsensical plots.
Murphy presents the years Moore found his way to success. All he had to do was act naturally — while being someone else — a motherfuckin’ pimp who’s got nothing to apologize for. You dig? Those African drums backing him echo with revolution these days. As a white man from a white town, now living in another white town, I was clueless, mouth agape. Wesley Snipes did make me laugh, playing a pretentious small-time actor who puts on airs as the director of Moore’s first blaxploitation film.
[after a scene with Moore doing what is supposed to be karate fighting]
D’Urville (Snipes): Cut!
Moore (Murphy): How was that?
D’Urville: I see no reason to do it again.
Rudy: Was it good as Shaft?
It was helpful when I read one review that compared the movie to “Ed Wood.” It’s an apt comparison, because mainstream caucasian Hollywood gave Johnny Depp a lot of credit for playing a quirky horror movie director of questionable talent. Eddie’s doing the same thing. Moore’s talent is definitely questionable, and Eddie’s own talent looks suspect as the curse-laden ranting sounds so much like him playing himself badly. But it’s time for this sadass, honky motherfucker to get widit, bruh! The whole movie — “Dolemite is My Name,” not “Dolemite,” the dumb movie within the movie — is actually a brilliant evocation of a time and a place and an outsized character in it.
And the revolution is on now.
– Knute Rimkus
[Perhaps this is a good time to recall Eddie Murphy’s revolutionary reggae song of five years ago, “Oh Jah Jah.”]
