Coming from a band as creative as OutKast, this film is a big letdown, because it lacks any creativity of its own. You've seen the plot a thousand times, most recently (or at least most famously) in 2001's Moulin Rouge!. The dialogue is pedestrian at best, and while a couple of the musical numbers have a certain energy, they're the exception in a sea of disappointing songs surrounded by lackluster acting and some poorly integrated visual frills. I had hoped to see something completely different, but I'd seen all of this before. (This review discusses several important plot points, including the ending, and is intended to be read after seeing the film.)

Set in 1930s Georgia, Idlewild is the story of Percival (Andre Benjamin) and Rooster (Big Boi), who have been friends since they were children; Rooster was the troublemaker, while Percival sometimes went along with him on his adventures but more often stayed home to help his dour father (Ben Vereen) at the family funeral home. As adults, they haven't changed much: Percival is reserved, saving his energy for the occasional piano gig at the Church, a speakeasy owned by Ace (Faizon Love) where Rooster is the main musical (and romantic) attraction. Rooster's inability to keep it in his pants causes him trouble with his wife and gets him tangled up in murder when local gangster and bootlegger Spats (Ving Rhames) and his unstable henchman Trumpy (Terrence Howard) become involved in a power struggle over the bootlegging business. Meanwhile, Percival falls for the beautiful singer Angel (Paula Patton), who knocks 'em dead until it comes time for her to actually sing.

It's common wisdom that rappers make natural actors because their stage personas are like characters, but as with most common wisdom, it's true sometimes and not true other times. Rooster requires Big Boi to be confident, outgoing, and always "on," and he acquits himself well, but Andre Benjamin's attempt at Percival strays too far into uninterestingness. He's supposed to be shy and reserved, but too often he just seems inert, like in one late scene where he stands up to his father. Terrence Howard seems to enjoy playing a one-dimensional bad guy, but there's only so much he can do with his stock character. And it's odd that Idlewild features several talented singers and dancers who don't get a chance to sing or dance: Patti LaBelle has a brief scene as a prima donna, but we never see her on stage, and Broadway star Ben Vereen barely gets to walk on his own as Percy Senior. Macy Gray, who has one of the better numbers, pretty much disappears after dramatically opening the film, and as the minutes tick by, we miss her more and more.

I detected not a whit of originality in the plot concocted by writer-director Bryan Barber, who graduated from directing OutKast in music videos to directing them in this film. Although not terribly original, the idea to populate a period piece with anachronistic rap numbers is still interesting, but Barber failed to develop the plot beyond a scaffolding of borrowed parts. It drops in threads of magical realism, like a rooster on a whiskey flask that talks to Rooster, and musical notes on Percival's scores that enact little vignettes while he's playing, but they're poorly integrated with the rest of the film, so they seem like anomalies. Worse, the dialogue is peppered with lines that were old when Hector was a pup, and the next time I see a film about performers that features someone saying "all the world's a stage" (or worse here, saying it three or four times), I'll... well, I'll be pretty annoyed. Like I was during Idlewild.

In addition to recycling most of its plot, it also recycles certain annoyingly misogynist plot contrivances, the most obvious being one that it borrowed from Moulin Rouge!: the female muse who draws the shy artist out of his shell and then buys the farm (hereafter, the Dying Muse). At least in Moulin Rouge!, there's no question of this end: Nicole Kidman hacks up enough blood throughout the film to make sure we understand that she won't be around for the end credits. The woman has to die, because if she were to stick around, inevitable post-credits things like marriage and children and mortgages might sap the creative juices she got flowing in the main character in the first place (there's also the risk that she could turn out more talented than her gentleman friend). Of course, she doesn't have to die: she can be sent to another continent, like Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love, but it's more dramatic if she dies—it gives the sensitive, bereaved artist a tinge of melancholy, as well as the guarantee that his lost love won't find another man to inspire.

Idlewild manages to interweave the Dying Muse with another hoary story crutch, One Last Job (I'm not sure which one is the warp and which is the weft). Percival and Angel are en route to the train station to escape Idlewild forever, but Percival has to make one last stop at the club, thus dooming poor Angel (there's another one, the Foreshadowing Name) to a final insult, the Unrandom Bullet (the kind that seems random until it inevitably hits an important subsidiary character). Had the friendship between Percival and Rooster been better developed, I might accept the One Last Job as necessary, but they hardly talk to each other in the film; we learn how close they were as children, but there's no indication of how their relationship as adults, which seems to be that of two entertainers who work in the same club and nothing more, would necessitate Percival's behavior. I mean, sure, we in the audience know that they're both members of OutKast, but that's not enough of an explanation.

However, the whole Dying Muse/One Last Job/Unrandom Bullet concoction does lead to one of the two standout musical numbers (even if it does borrow heavily from the video for Tom Petty's "Mary Jane's Last Dance"), when Percival prepares Angel's body for burial in a remarkably erotic manner. This is what I wanted more of out of the musical numbers, which unfortunately only this one and Macy Gray's opener provided: the sense that something subversive and unexpected was happening. Aside from those numbers and the novelty of the anachronistic rap numbers, which wore off quickly (and besides, the idea of anachronistic music in a period piece was one of the things this film borrowed), the music was a big letdown. I really like OutKast, and what attracted me to them was how outlandishly they blend styles: the first time I heard one of their songs, I thought "What the heck is that?" (in a good way). They didn't sound like anything else. Here, it sounds like they've run out of ideas.

—September 3, 2006