Film review: Dolemite Is My Name (2019)

Want to see a heartwarming feel-good story that also features a better-than-he's-been-in-decades Eddie Murphy saying "motherfucker" practically every other word?  This film's for you!  It's a biopic about Rudy Ray Moore, a failed R'n'B singer who tried his hand at stand up comedy in the early '70s and perfected a persona of an eloquent pimp (Dolemite) who told Rabelaisian tall tales in rhyming couplets.  At every stage he faced skepticism and had to go it alone until his success became so apparent that financial backers stepped forward.  For example, he taped a "party record" (like Redd Foxx's very popular (and also obscene) lps) but no record company would release it until he (on money borrowed from his aunt - my favorite scene in the movie) financed his own pressing and started selling it out of the trunk of his car.  Then he goes on tour and recruits a plump female protege whom he sees knocking down her unfaithful husband in the back of a club he's performing in, adding to the amiable entourage he already has.  (Familiar faces in this film include Snoop Dogg, Keegan-Michael Key, Craig Robinson, Chris Rock and, playing definitely against type as a camp drunk actor/director, Wesley Snipes.)  He is called back when the record company that eventually signed him (they're run by what I took to be an Arab family, so neither in the white nor the black world) want him to record more records, as the first one is wildly successful.  Then, somewhere along the way, after a bad experience with the Matthau/Lemon version of The Front Page, he decides that there is a market for a movie starring Dolemite.  Of course, he has to do it himself, and recruits Key as an earnest local playwright with a social conscience (a fellow Arkansas refugee) to help structure it, and Snipes as a semi-celebrity (he says he's been "directed by Roman Polanski" because he was an elevator operator in Rosemary's Baby) to lend it gravitas.  Then they get some white kids who are students at UCLA film school to do the filming, and Moore moves into an old abandoned hotel (having first acquired the manager job by turfing out all the junkies as a deal with the owner) which becomes the sets.  Of course nobody wants to buy the finished film, but on a suggestion from an Indianapolis DJ (Rock) he rents a cinema for $500 if he can keep the ticket sales.  It's a huge success, so, again, a movie company (headed by Bob Odenkirk) buys it and the film ends with its LA premiere, with queues snaking round the block.  As I said, a feel-good film.  In fact, if it wasn't for the relentless vulgarity and Murphy's wonderful comic but sincere performance, it might be treacly.