The very title of Dolemite Is My Name is both a declaration and an introduction, abbreviating one of the character's signature lines: "Dolemite is my name, and fucking up motherfuckers is my game." But after this crowdpleaser, it's unlikely you'll need that reminder ever again.
Eddie Murphy stars as Rudy Ray Moore, the struggling entertainer who finally struck gold when he created the trash-talking, ass-kicking, lady-killing Dolemite persona, based on the tall tales of a local homeless man, and then cemented his place in cultural history with the 1975 blaxploitation film Dolemite.
Like Rudy himself, where Dolemite Is My Name really shines is at putting on a show.
Rudy represents Murphy's first screen role in three years, and he hasn't lost a step. Indeed, Dolemite Is My Name is the best he's been since at least 2006's Dreamgirls. Murphy makes Rudy likable but not quite cuddly. He has the insatiable hunger of a hustler and the wounded pride of a never-was, but Murphy seems to realize that the character's real secret weapon is his earnestness. You just want Rudy to succeed, even when his lack of talent suggests he probably shouldn't.
As a character study, Dolemite Is My Name is just fine. While Rudy's thwarted dreams, entrepreneurial spirit, and winning personality get plenty of screen time, we get little sense of who he is outside is career ambitions. If he has more personal desires, we don't hear much about them; if he has a more jagged side, we get barely a hint of it.
The genesis of Dolemite plays out in perfectly formulaic fashion, down to supporting characters whose entire purpose seems to be having exposition delivered at them. It's saved by Murphy's bright performance, Rudy's actual jokes, and the delighted can-you-believe-it tone that director Craig Brewer and screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski adopt throughout the whole thing — and, at the TIFF premiere screening, by an energetic crowd whose laughter echoed those of the audiences onscreen.
Like Rudy himself, though, where Dolemite Is My Name really shines is at putting on a show — in this case, about putting on a show. The film shifts into a higher gear once the rubber meets the road on Rudy's cinematic ambitions, taking on the energy of a zippy heist flick. If you're a sucker for watching scrappy outsiders band together to get away with something the world has told them they shouldn't, Dolemite Is My Name is for you.
It's also around this time that film's most interesting non-Rudy characters come to the forefront. Wesley Snipes is a hoot as director D'Urville Martin, so twitchy and mannered he seems to have beamed down to the Dolemite set from another planet entirely. (And in a way, he has — D'Urville is the one member of the team who's worked before in mainstream Hollywood projects.)
The true breakout here is Da'Vine Joy Randolph, playing Rudy's colleague, confidant, and eventual co-star Lady Reed. When Rudy first meets her, he tells her that "some people walk around with their own spotlight," and it's easy to see precisely what he means because Randolph, in this film, has the same effect. She attracts our attention right away, and holds it even in scenes when her character is simply listening. My only complaint about her performance is that I wanted even more of it.
As Rudy gets ready to present his film to the world, Lady Reed thanks him for allowing her to be a part of it, since she's never seen anyone like herself onscreen before. It's one of the clunkier exchanges in the film, too self-satisfied to be entirely believable. But it does make explicit one of the distinctions between Dolemite Is My Name and similar outsider-art narratives like The Disaster Artist.
This isn't just about one guy's vanity project, but about the community he built around it, and the underserved community it spoke to. Rudy faces skepticism, rejection, and outright disbelief as he tries to make and release his movie: "Yes, this is a real film," he sighs to one potential distributor over the phone. But Rudy, we know, will get the last laugh. The fact that we're sitting here watching an uplifting movie all about him is proof of that.
