Starring Don Cheadle (who is the only reason I gave this film a shot), Talk To Me is sort of a biopic about Petey Green, a Washington DC DJ from the late 60's to the early 80's.
The first thing about the film that caught my attention was as the opening credits rolled, black name after black name appeared, and then........."Martin Sheen", I laughed heartily. God bless his cracka ass.
So anyway, the film starts out with Petey in prison, where he's serving time for small time stuff, and doing a little prison DJ'ing.
Upon getting out of jail Petey tries to use some connections to land a gig, of course never having actually been on the radio, this is a daunting task. The task is made even tougher when the man he tries to convince (Dewey Hughes, portrayed by Chiwetel Ejiofor) perceives Petey as nothing more than a con man street hustler.
Eventually Petey and Dewey have a meeting of the minds of sort during a fantastic scene in a pool hall that really is remarkable film making and storytelling, even if it only lasts a few minutes.
From there the film sort of loses it's way. At times it plays as a ghetto Private Parts, other times it becomes a film about friendship and greed, and then still it tries to cover the political issues of the day. Never do any one of these topics get the time needed to become the focus of film and it really suffers because of it.
Chadle and Ejiofer are really good and Tarajo Henson as Peteys long time girlfriend is magnificent but the focus of the film is so all over the place that I never really feel like I knew all that much about any of them.
About 90 minutes into the film I was itching to come online and look up info on Petey Green, which tells you how much info i felt like i was getting from the film.
All in all there are some really good scenes that I would recommend heartily, but in the grand scheme of things exceed the final product greatly.
As a side note, if you any of you have seen the Watermelon Eating demonstration on Youtube, that's Petey Green.
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