Motown magic in a movie

To say that Dreamgirls is the best musical so far this century is to make no great claim for it. To say that it's the best film about the music business since Allison Anders's 1996 Grace of My Heart and fit to be spoken of in the same breath says more. Anders' movie was a lightly fictionalized biopic of singer and songwriter Carole King and her circle of musicians who worked in the celebrated Brill Building near Times Square from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. It dealt with a period of cultural change in which Tin Pan Alley composers gave way to rock bands who wrote their own stuff, an era which saw the rise of the concept album, girl bands and the use of psychedelic drugs.

Dreamgirls deals with the same period and similar issues from a black perspective, that of the musicians who started out with Berry Gordy's Tamla Motown label. Gordy established his company in 1959 and it created a new kind of black sound that appealed to a steadily widening audience, going far beyond a minority ethnic appeal. It turned Detroit, for a while at least, into one of the hottest, most influential pop centers in the world.

The movie is written and directed by Bill Condon, who scripted the last substantial Hollywood musical, Chicago, and showed his flair for locating cine-biographies in a revealing historical context with bold studies of gay movie director James Whale (Gods and Monsters) and sexologist Alfred Kinsey (Kinsey).

Behind his film, however, there is the figure of the late Michael Bennett, who worked with Stephen Sondheim and Harold Prince on Company and Follies and conceived A Chorus Line. In 1981, he directed and choreographed Dreamgirls on Broadway, and although the book and lyrics are by Tom Eyen, and Henry Krieger wrote the music, this production was generally regarded as Bennett's work. Sadly, the show never came to Britain.

The New York Times theater critic, Frank Rich, no pushover, wrote that Bennett "keeps Dreamgirls in constant motion — in every conceivable direction — to perfect his special brand of cinematic stage effects [montage, dissolves, wipes] … throughout the show, Mr. Bennett uses shadows, klieg lights, background figures and eerie silhouettes to maintain the constant tension."

Condon has tried for a similar dynamic sweep and for a lot of the time he succeeds. He rushes us through the years as his characters start out in Detroit, where their roots remain, and proceed to flit around the country, with Los Angeles and Vegas becoming their chosen professional home. The movie is essentially the story of Diana Ross and the Supremes, presented as a portrait of Deena Jones and the Dreams, who start out as a backing trio to the volatile black rocker James "Thunder" Early (Eddie Murphy), a character evidently inspired by James Brown, before becoming a single act. The movie is about ambition and self-fulfillment, commercial imperatives and authentic black music and selling out for money and fame as opposed to standing up for integrity and self-expression.

The chief manipulator is Curtis Taylor (Jamie Foxx), a suave, black businessman in Detroit who switches from selling cars to peddling stars and coolly steers the working-class black girls into becoming crossover performers for white audiences. There's an acute scene when Taylor gets a booking for them at a smart Miami nightspot, the first black artists to appear there, and they're introduced to a largely unappreciative white audience by a patronizing, racist Jewish master of ceremonies.