American Idle

Any movie whose release has been delayed for nearly a year usually arrives bearing at least a whiff of failure. And when the delayed movie happens to be a big-budget period-piece musical overseen by a first-time director and starring two rappers with limited acting experience, the smell becomes overwhelming.

Fortunately for all involved, Outkast’s ambitious, eye-popping gangster (as opposed to gangsta) epic Idlewild doesn’t reek, although its reach may exceed its grasp. Written and directed by longtime video director Bryan Barber, this long-gestating project finds Andre “Andre 3000” Benjamin and Antwan “Big Boi” Patton playing Prohibition-era caricatures of their Outkast personas. “The characters were drawn from my and Dre’s personalities,” Big Boi tells Blender. “Our own life experiences are thrown in here and there.” And just as the breakout Speakerboxxx/The Love Below was basically two solo albums grafted together, this at times feels like two separate movies.

In one storyline, Andre’s Percival is a painfully shy mortician/musician who becomes romantically involved with a mysterious torch singer (comely newcomer Paula Patton, no relation to Big Boi). In the other, Big Boi’s Rooster is a philandering nightclub manager caught up in a bloody turf war with a scheming thug named Trumpy (the omnipresent Terrence Howard). Though Percival and Rooster are childhood pals and most of the movie’s action takes place in Rooster’s rural Georgia club, The Church, there isn’t much connection between the two threads beyond a series of visually lush choreographed set pieces that blend contemporary hip-hop with big-band jazz, often with stultifying results. But Big Boi resists classifying this as a musical, stressing that 80% of the music on Idlewild’s soundtrack was written and recorded after the film finished production.

“It’s not The Wizard of Oz, like I’m talking to you and just break into song,” he contends. “It’s a real movie that happens to have a musical component.”

One such component features Andre 3000 serenading a recently deceased loved one on an autopsy table to the less-than-sentimental strains of “She Lives in My Lap.” It’s a jarring sequence, evoking chuckles instead of pathos and likely to confuse as many people as it entertains. But it’s anomalous juxtapositions like this, both musically and otherwise, that have moved 20 million Outkast albums, so Barber just might be on to something, and even if Idlewild occasionally bewilders, it rarely bores. The Love Below garnered its fair share of Prince comparisons, and this project could as well: Purple Rain it’s not, but thankfully, neither is it Under the Cherry Moon.

Musical oddities of a different sort abound in Alexandra Lipsitz’s documentary Air Guitar Nation, which is smarter than any movie about drunken idiots miming Randy Rhoads solos in front of other drunken idiots needs to be.

“That’s just about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of,” grumbles CNN’s Jack Cafferty on-air after a segment about costumed mock-stars duking it out in New York for a trip to the Air Guitar World Championships in Oulu, Finland, and it’s hard to argue with him. But what saves the film from being an excruciating exercise in hipster irony run amok is the fact that its central character, kimono-clad U.S. champ C-Diddy, né soft-spoken aspiring actor David Jung, seems just as befuddled by the appeal of grown men publicly shredding on an invisible axe as grumpy old Jack. C-Diddy’s foil, perennial also-ran Bjorn Turoque (say it out loud) doesn’t share this detachment, and his obsession with funding his own trips to L.A. and Finland in an ill-fated attempt to dethrone the king makes for the film’s more uncomfortable moments.  

Turoque also has a book about his escapades due this month, so this pop culture moment may have already reached its tipping point. But if the enthusiasm of the onscreen competitors, organizers, audience members and, truth be told, the screening attendees is any indication, “aireoke” has a fighting chance of knocking karaoke off its perch as the entertainment of choice for booze-drenched social gatherings everywhere. Simon Cowell disparaging fretwork and leg-kicks from the judge’s panel may not be far behind.

Finally, the idea of Jeff Bridges playing a small-town sad sack who heads up the novice crew of a porn flick might sound like a potential return to his Big Lebowski glory days. Unfortunately, though, the amateurs never lives up to its premise, despite backup from the reliably awesome Tim Blake Nelson and Joey Pants.