Talk to Me: Critic Reviews

A rowdy, richly offbeat biopic.

Talk to Me offers uplift without phoniness, history without undue didacticism and a fair number of funny, dirty jokes.

The movie is decent enough, but contains Greene's story in a sentimentalised career arc.

Speaks powerfully to audiences with its potent blend of extraordinary performances and engaging soundtrack.

It makes you feel not only the joy people experienced in the wash of Greene's raucous, truth-saying humor, but also his wisdom and calm.

Smart, conflicted, and immensely entertaining.

Talk To Me lacks every kind of specificity (historical, psychological, socio-cultural) but redeems itself through the dedication of its Cheadlicious lead.

About halfway through the movie, it changes direction, becoming less a biographical drama about Petey than a maudlin buddy movie about his relationship with Dewey.

Its dialogue, equal parts uptight honky and jumping jive seems, particularly in the early stretches, to have been generated by a computer.

Talk to Me is more than enough fun as a showcase for Mr. Cheadle's wit and spontaneity and as an inside look at the airwaves' transition from warm and fuzzy comforter to the anything-goes entertainment of today.

Lemmons, her extraordinary cast and gifted crew deliver laughing, crying and plenty of signifying.

The movie begins with a whirlpool of comedy and manic energy, and then grows, as it must, more serious and introspective.

Blessedly free of the usual biopic freight and sanctimony, the exuberant new film Talk to Me has a great subject and a great actor working in tandem.

I was bummed out by the movie's trite VH1 cartoon of the black power era -- especially coming from Kasi Lemmons, who made her directing debut with the hauntingly ambiguous Eve's Bayou.

Don Cheadle -- explosive because you've never before seen this model of actorly restraint -- is a one-man fireworks show in Talk to Me, Kasi Lemmons' rollicking, resonant portrait of the real-life ex-con who improbably became a civic icon.

... has a solid sense of time and place and character.

[A] well-acted film about making the move from the street to the mainstream.

Don Cheadle has elevated yet another film: Talk to Me is better than it intends to be. But thank Ejiofor as well.

Alternates too deliberately between jaunty comedy and serious message-making.

The movie also presents '60s turbulence from a black point of view, which is not only bracing but also feels closer to the point of it all.

Cheadle gives a performance of contained cool and bluff bravado, suggesting barely a hint of the rage you would expect from a man just out of a nine-year prison sentence.

The characters are brought to vivid life with remarkably compelling performances by two of the screen's most versatile actors: Don Cheadle as the freewheeling Greene; and Chiwetel Ejiofor as Hughes, the aggressively ambitious executive.

The problem is, the last section of the movie doesn't follow the career path of Greene: It traces the blander character of Hughes.

...a movie that perfectly captures the vibe of a person, a place, a time and a way of being, and even gets, indirectly and without a whiff of sanctimoniousness, to the heart of what being an American ought to mean.

Again demonstrating why he's one of the most versatile actors around, Don Cheadle gives another prize-worthy performance as Ralph Waldo 'Petey' Greene Jr.