Darnell Martin made an impressive feature directing debut in 1994 with the smart, energetic comedy I Like It Like That--the title wasn't her idea, thanks--and then seemed to vanish from the scene. So it's great news that she's back, and at the helm of one of the few December releases that gives promise of being more about showing the audience a good time than whoring after Mammon or Oscar: Cadillac Records, the story of how Chess Records, led by Leonard Chess (played in the movie by Adrien Brody, who's way overdue for a big role where he doesn't spend the movie getting the shit kicked out of him or losing the girl to a 25-foot gorilla), brought blues and rock and roll to the Clearasilled masses of young, white America. Although Martin wrote the script, she didn't initiate the project: it fell into her lap when someone as Sony BMG, in the throes of a bout of corporate good sense, pitched her to come on board. It turns out that Martin, who grew up in the Bronx, wasn't exactly what she calls a "blues maniac." She immersed herself in the period, reading books and talking to those who were there, until, Frank Di Giacomo writes, "She came to see the film as an ensemble story that depicted the intersecting lives of some of Chess’s biggest stars." Martin told Di Giacomo that “I started to see these guys with each other,” and "It’s like GoodFellas. It’s like a Western. The blues is about machismo.” Besides Brody, the cast includes such tough hombres as Jeffrey Wright, who plays Muddy Waters, and Mos' Def, who got to update his Halloween wardrobe when he scored the role of Chuck Berry. Steve Jordan, who served as music director on the film, and who's played with Berry, says that "“Mos Def is Chuck Berry. Chuck’s sarcasm, his wit, and his naïveté—Mos displays it all at some point in this film.”

Jordan's presence on the set is a reassuring sign that the movie, whose action spans a quarter of a century, will get the right things right. Martin is already braced for attacks from the blues maniacs who don't get artisitic license or who, rather than see their own favorites omitted, would just as soon the movie have a running time of twenty-five years. At the center of her script is a love story between Leonard Chess and Etta James (Beyoncé Knowles), the blues balladeer who, Martin says, once called Chess "the only man who knew that she was vulnerable.” Martin's daring to speculate about their relationship will give purists fits, though Leonard's son, Martin, who ran the company for a while after his father's death in 1969, and who remains friendly with Etta James, has already signaled approval of, at least, Knowles's performance, saying, "“I’ve been around enough junkies in my life to tell you it was real.” Cadillac Records arrives at an interesting time, as a reminder that, just fifty years before the election of America's first black president, interracial dancing was a revolutionary act. Di Giacomo describes the shooting of a scene re-creating a Chuck Berry concert, where a voice boomed over the intercom, complaining to some of the undermotivated extras: “Cops, you’ve got to go crazy! You see people mixing. That is not right!”