The music, it goes without saying, is spectacular and wonderful and often shown as developing out of a myriad of things (frustration, sadness, joy, craziness, anguish, love), but the script does follow some of those lines that are troublesome in bio-pics (one character, Little Walter, is the proverbial black sheep and that's almost all he is, and there's the obvious dippings in-and-out of relationship things). The actors, it should be said, really do a lot of heavy lifting here. We may not get an entire life story out of all those in the film, but unlike Walk the Line or Ray we don't need it at all to know these people, or the characters. Cadillac Records covers some of the crucial blues artists- Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Chuck Berry (the cross-over), Willie Dixon, Etta James- and how their personalities were shaped by whatever was around them, and then into the songs. There was always blues in the US in the 20th century, but it grew steadily, out of sorrow and bad days and nights and hate and love gone bad or good for African Americans. The best thing about Cadillac Records, the thing that will have me go back and watch it again more than anything, is that it captures what it was like to be around the one of the significant blues explosions in America. There's an attitude to a kind of music, whether it's punk or jazz or psychedelic rock or even in "wtf" mode in I'm Not There. Sometimes all we can hope for is that they get the mood right, and even that isn't attained some years back the wildly over-praised Ray had strong performances but, to me, didn't really capture that feel of what it was like to be in the midst of something really spectacular- we only saw it being great for Ray Charles (not that his music didn't help the movie, somewhat besides the point). The best bio-pics on musicians tend to get it just about right (Bird, Sid & Nancy, The Doors, Walk the Line) even if the films aren't great or, even worse, have those tired old conventions of real-life people fit in tidy fashion for a 2-hour storyline. It's hard to get a feel for a specific time and period in movies let alone an actual mood of a particular music. Reviewed by Quinoa1984 8 / 10 sure, it may have it's share of clichés and pit-falls, but it makes you feel the Blues, deep down your spine, long after you leave
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