Ray Charles changed the face of American popular music, radically changed the recording industry, helped destroy Jim Crow in the south, lived and loved larger than life—all this, and he had been blind since a young age. It's tempting to think of him as a sort of superhero. This film, which is full of ups and downs, caves in to that temptation a little too often, but it's still worth watching because of Jamie Foxx, who plays Ray Charles. In judging Ray, it's necessary to divide it into two parts: Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles, and the rest of the film. Foxx is simply brilliant; he is Ray Charles, or seems to be, since I can't really say that I knew the man all that well. Physically, though, he is a doppleganger: the movements, the facial expressions, the enthusiastic piano playing, it's all exactly like I remember Charles being. Even the voice is the same. It's simply stunning. The rest of the film, in several ways, fails the high standard set by Foxx. It's two and a half hours long, and it feels unnecessarily choppy, especially the ending, which feels cobbled together, perhaps because of Ray Charles's death. Although it deals only with part of his life—from his first trip to Seattle to become a professional musician to his audacious merging of country and R&B, with some flashbacks to his childhood and one flash-forward to 1979—it still feels like it's trying to cover too much ground. Perhaps this is an inherent problem with biopics, but other biopics have escaped that fractured feeling.

A biopic wants to explain its subject to viewers; the filmmakers usually look to Freud to figure out what makes the person tick. This film's theory is that the big issues in Ray Charles's life are his blindness and the drowning death of his younger brother when they were only children. Charles told his biographer David Ritz that the only time he suffered a nervous breakdown was not over the death of his brother or his blindness, but over the death of his mother Aretha; this event doesn't make it into the film at all, nor does his experience at the school for the blind where he learned to write and play music. Now, this is a tricky area in biopics: my personal policy is that I don't really mind if a film changes the events of a person's life, emphasizes events of its own choosing, or fudges timelines. This is because I don't go to movies like this for history lessons; I go to movies like this to see how the filmmakers chose to present the life. As long as it seems faithful to the person's life, I don't mind changes. My issues with the film are not really about what it included or what conclusions it drew, but about how it went about doing so.

The first, and most important, place the film went wrong was with a series of flashbacks that illustrated his childhood. They are filmed in a grainy, oversaturated palette; they are strident and overbearing. There's no dialog except for Important Statements, mostly from his mother. Through these flashbacks, we learn how his brother died, what it was like for him to slowly go blind, and the lessons he learned from his hard-working and self-sufficient mother. All of this would have been perfectly fine, but for their strident tone and the subpar performances of the two children chosen to play Ray and his brother. The worst scene in the film comes when, in the midst of rehab, an adult, sighted Ray journeys back to his overlit halcyon, where his mother tells him how proud she is and his dead brother tells him "It wasn't your fault." Who the hell came up with this dreck? It's a breakthrough scene straight out of an introductory psychology textbook, and it shouldn't be in a film of this caliber. The film ties everything up in a nice package that would have made Freud smile. Having kicked his heroin habit, Ray Charles plays his way into the sunset, happily married and clean. This isn't the case, of course: Charles traded in his heroin habit for a drinking problem and daily marijuana use, and he kept on womanizing, through a nasty divorce from his beloved wife Della Bea. This overly packaged ending is another symptom of this film's betrayal of its subject. It doesn't trust the audience to accept a flawed, brilliant man; it wants to leave him a saint in our eyes, which rings false.

There's also the small issue of Jim Crow. The film presents Charles as suddenly deciding, on the spur of the moment, that he won't play in segregated venues in Georgia, which leads to him being banned from playing in the state until 1979, when the government apologized, readopted him, and made his "Georgia on My Mind" their state song. I simply can't believe that it worked this way, that he would be completely turned around in the course of one thirty-second conversation with one protestor. I don't know what the real story, but I can't accept that Jim Crow was something he never gave a thought until that moment, and then he suddenly decided that he would give up his most lucrative market on a whim. The version given by the film seems so telescoped that it is almost insulting; somebody please write and tell me that this is really the way it happened, so I stop thinking that the film insulted my intelligence. Again, the issue is not whether the film changed events of his life, but whether what is onscreen works. This scene simply doesn't work.

What works are individual scenes. I liked the scenes involving the workings of the recording industry, especially Ray's triumph in getting contol of his master recordings when he switched to ABC Paramount mid-career. I liked the tour bus scenes of Ray's early days, as the shy, awkward, and blind young man adapted to the sometimes dishonest world of being a working musician. Especially good are Ray's interactions with his first manager, Jeff Brown (Clifton Powell), and the early scenes with his longtime mistress Margie Hendricks (Regina King). The background material isn't terrible, it just hovers slightly above the level of TV-movie. The supporting cast is mostly good, especially Bokeem Woodbine as band member Fathead Newman, Kerry Washington as Charles's wife Della Bea, and Curtis Armstrong as producer Ahmet Ertegun. Those performances work like a rhythm section supporting Jamie Foxx's solo as Ray Charles, a performance that is sure to win a deserved Oscar, a performance that, along with his turn in Collateral, indicates that Jamie Foxx has more range than most actors working. I can only wait to see what he does next.