'Dreamgirls" rockets at warp speed from Detroit to the stratosphere, boosted by the performances of Eddie Murphy and Jennifer Hudson as singers left behind by soul's crossover to the pop charts.
Bill Condon's screen adaptation of the 1981 Broadway sensation is, if possible, as dazzling and energizing as its source. Because the movie foregrounds the story of showbiz glory and shame against the triumphs and failures of the civil-rights movement, this razzle-dazzle has teeth.
It's social history in song, with great dresses.
In an era when hip-hop so completely dominates popular music, it may be ancient history that rhythm-and-blues artists of the 1950s and '60s were deemed too black for white America. This thinly veiled account of how Berry Gordy Jr.
engineered the rise of the Supremes from Motown backup singers to Las Vegas headliners asks why, in seeking mainstream acceptance, soul artists sold their souls along with their artistic integrity. Is it just the price of fame?
A backstage musical in which the drama comes in lyrics bursting with helplessness and high hopes, "Dreamgirls" opens in a flurry of movement and a blaze of light - suggesting of the mother ship in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
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It's a close encounter of the trio kind: three identically dressed Detroit homegirls, poufs of bouffant hair and skirts, at a talent show. The brassy one with the pipes is Effie (Jennifer Hudson). The one who sounds like a giggling flute is Lorrell (Anika Noni Rose).
And then there's the clarinet-voiced Deena (Beyonce Knowles), poised and pretty, accustomed to standing in Effie's shadow.
No sooner are they discovered than the "Dreamettes" are singing backup to soul legend James "Thunder" Early (Murphy, pugnacious and poignant). Curtis Taylor Jr.
(Jamie Foxx), a used-Cadillac dealer, regards the beauties as the vehicle that will drive him out of the ghetto and into Hollywood.
The soul Svengali takes up with Effie, redesigning the Dreamettes as the Dreams, confecting for them vanilla satin gowns and matching music. But when Curtis decides that Deena, lighter, thinner and more conventionally pretty than Effie, should front the group and share his bed, the dream curdles.
And provides Hudson's Effie with the pyrotechnic "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going," anthem of a love back-burnered. (Except for this and "Listen," written and performed by Beyonce, it's not the songs you remember about "Dreamgirls," but what the songs reveal about the character singing.)
Condon's lightning pace makes the movie sparkle - and snap.
He orchestrates it as a visual and musical medley, one number segueing into the next - occasionally the same number - as it bridges a rehearsal of the song and its performance. His screenplay for the movie version of "Chicago" likewise employed this device, making the movie rush by.
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