Dolemite Is My Name is a movie I was really excited about when I saw the trailer, then it took me a year and a half to watch it. I knew it to be the [dramatized] true story behind the infamous blaxploitation film phenomenon Dolemite, a character crafted by Rudy Ray Moore who I first heard on a Big Daddy Kane record (content warning: it’s quite vulgar). Dolemite is My Name is about a bunch of friends getting together to make a movie; something fun and entertaining that spoke to the times it was made in, not by representing a serious critical analysis of the zeitgeist, but by creating a humorous yet authentic reflection of cultural values. The movie they made, Dolemite, was true not because it represented everyday life but because it evoked the desires and fantasies that everyday life inspired within the people that made it. This film seems a fairly accurate representation of what that time and process were like, though – unlike BlackkKlansman, Greenbook, or Judas and the Black Messiah – it didn’t generate a cavalcade of thinkpieces on what it dramatized or edited. Dolemite is my Name argues that movies – and I would argue art and storytelling of any medium – can have objective positive value while being of subjective positive quality by nature of appealing to new audiences and showcasing new points of view. It argues that your art is worth finishing and worth sharing for the sake of the process, and that you can win if you bet on yourself, though success is not promised.

The story of Rudy Ray Moore as depicted in Dolemite is My Name is that of an entertainer who aspired to fame and succeeded by refusing to take no for an answer. When we meet Rudy Ray Moore, he is a failed musician trying unsuccessfully to get the DJ at the record store he works at to play his music. After having to remove an unhoused person from his store, he decides to pay that man and other local street people for their entertaining anecdotes, riffing on that and creating a stand-up comedy persona combining their wit with the aesthetics of a 70s pimp. He succeeds in selling tickets to comedy shows and eventually printing vinyl records. He recruits Lady Reed (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) as his protégé; and collaborates with his coworkers and friends from the record store (Titus Burgess as Theodore Toney and Mike Epps as Jimmy Lynch) and the entertainment nightlife (Craig Robinson as musician Ben Taylor) to propel his stardom. They take some of their hard-earned gains to watch a comedy film for white audiences that falls completely flat for them, inspiring them to make a movie geared toward the tastes of their community. They recruit playwright Jerry Jones (Keegan-Michael Key) to write, with blaxploitation actor D’Urville Martin (Wesley Snipes) taking a turn as director.

Moore gets a loan from his aunt (played by comedian-actress Luenell) and an advance from his record company (Aleksandar Filimonovic plays Joseph Bihari of Modern Records) to finance the production. Kodi Smit-McPhee (Nightcrawler in the last two X-Men movies) plays cinematographer Nicholas Josef von Sternberg, one of a few white UCLA film school kids that take on the production as a chance to do what all filmmakers want to do – make a feature production. Moore aims to make a movie that has all of the comedy and all of the action, and combines with Jones (who wants to make something serious that speaks to the street) and Martin (who thinks he is above it all) to create a film that ends up panned by critics but adored by a cult audience. We get on-screen epilogue text before the credits that notes Rudy Ray Moore’s continued success with the Dolemite character, and a throwaway description of Rudy Ray Moore as “The Godfather of Rap” as well as clips from the real Dolemite movie showing how accurately they were able to reconstruct the film. But let’s talk about that rap angle for a second, and how it ties into the film’s themes.

Much like the poet Gil Scott-Heron, Rudy Ray Moore is considered a predecessor or forefather to rap, but whereas Gil Scott-Heron’s recorded poetry was largely about social change and injustice, Rudy Ray Moore’s comedy albums used the character Dolemite as a hyperbolic exemplary combination of pimps and prototypical action heroes. So, broadly speaking, if you wanted to credit Gil Scott-Heron as one of the forebears of ‘conscious’ rap, you could credit Rudy Ray Moore as a forebear of the self-aggrandizing style of rap whose lineage runs from the Sugar Hill Gang to DaBaby. Like both of those acts, a big part of Dolemite’s lyrical wit focused on his sexual prowess. One of the key story beats is Rudy Ray Moore struggling with the feeling that he is attempting to portray a “sex machine” archetype without having the bonafides. Jerry Jones writes what he describes as a passionate love sequence, but Moore and the production team turn it into a comedy because that’s what they know how to do. 

I thought the “Godfather of Rap” reference was an odd one to make in the epilogue because it’s not a big part of how Moore is presented in the movie. He’s seen explicitly as a performer, as an entertainer, as someone who has both been a singer and incorporates rhyme schemes into his comedy, but he’s never – in the text of the film – made out to be a poet or establishing a new musical art form. However, his use of braggadocio and his commitment to establishing a character who is a fictionalized and exaggerated version of himself and the world around him remains part and parcel both of modern standup comedy while also an entrenched component of rap music – from Christopher Wallace’s deployment of the fictionalized Biggie Smalls to Nas’s “NY State of Mind” to Kool G Rap’s The Giancana Story to Ice Cube’s writing for Eazy-E. Rudy Ray Moore has been sampled by Madlib, A Tribe Called Quest, 2 Live Crew, and countless other rappers.

There are a lot of movies made about the art of making movies, and people within the industry tend to love those often-very-self-serious films. What I love about Dolemite Is My Name is that it’s fun and triumphant and so real. While completely ignored by the Oscars and BAFTA (despite its limited theatrical release), the performances, editing, costume, design, and film overall received nods and wins from organizations including but not limited to the AAFCA, Black Reel, NAACP Image, Critics’ Choice, and Golden Globes; it made the National Board of Review’s Top Ten for 2019; and Eddie Murphy won one of the Razzie’s few positive awards, The Razzie Redeemer. 

You may notice that those first three groups – the African American Film Critics Association, Black Reel, and NAACP – are intrinsically geared toward focusing on Black art. Meanwhile, the more prestigious Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) didn’t give the film any consideration. I don’t know that there are intentional politics at hand, but I do know that there is a reflection of implicit bias. The most recent Oscars announcements show Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods has been snubbed, and I wonder if it’s because of his protest about Greenbook. Dolemite Is My Name is a film about Black people overcoming long odds to make art for Black people. This is inherently reflected in the casting:

This movie has everybody in it. I remembered Eddie Murphy starred as Rudy Ray Moore and Wesley Snipes played a key role. I was completely unaware that the film would also feature Keegan-Michael Key, Mike Epps, Craig Robinson, and Titus Burgess among the main cast. Alleged serial abuser T.I. (credited in the film as Tip “T.I.” Harris, rather than Clifford “T.I.” Harris) makes an appearance. Chris Rock plays a radio host who helps promote the Dolemite film. I sure didn’t expect Luenell to appear. Snoop Dogg is a mainstay of the first act, portraying Rudy Ray Moore’s record store coworker Roj the DJ. Bob Odenkirk shows up later in the film as film exec Lawrence Woolner. Part of the focus of their conversation is making sure they don’t get ripped off; making sure some white dudes in suits don’t take responsibility and financial reward for their hard work.

One structural critique I have is that, while I very much appreciate that it Is a primarily-Black cast, the director (Craig Brewer of Hustle and Flow, Black Snake Moan, and 2021’s Coming 2 America), the writers (Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski), and two of the three producers (John Davis and John Fox, excepting, obviously, Eddie Murphy) are white. Craig Brewer’s catalog suggest he likes working with Black folks, and the names involved with some of his projects really don’t have to settle to work with just anyone and it’s hard for me to put down a blanket ban – regardless of knowing it carries no weight – on who can tell what story, but the implications here are between irony and insidiousness. I just can’t help but wonder what the version of Dolemite Is My Name written and directed by Black people would look like. It’s really weird to think about how often these old white dudes wrote “nigga” in their script to tell this story.

I am not an intimate student of blaxploitation. Aside from Superfly, my catalog of the old vulgar action films made for the Black audience is a bit bereft. Granted, I have had a lot of fun with films that satirize blaxploitation, like I’m Gunna Git You, Sucka; Undercover Brother; and, perhaps most of all, Black Dynamite. I enjoyed Jackie Brown, which is not a blaxploitation film but which harkens to it with the lead actress and some of the musical choices. I enjoyed Samuel L. Jackson in 2000’s Shaft sequel, though I’ve yet to see the 2019 follow-up to that film. I did review Trying to Get Over (about the ten Black directors to make films in Hollywood between the end of Blaxploitation and the emergence of Spike Lee) for my undergrad historical journal, and I recommend any student of film or pop culture history – especially of the Black influence on American pop art culture generally and film specifically – read it. I say all that to say that I’ve been around the genre but not fully enmeshed; yet, from what I know and have seen, this is an apt representation of what it would be like to make such a film. Yet I will continue to wonder what was lost.

If I wanted to pick apart this film, I would have very little to say about the performances. I do believe that there was a dubious level of tension created in the second act fall where the protagonist is in trouble financially between finishing the film and finding someone to release it, because I knew eventually success was coming. I would also say that Dolemite Is My Name doesn’t pass the Bechdel test, though it does have an excellent leading lady performance in Da’Vine Joy Randolph. I wonder what it would be like to have a greater focus on the women that make up Lady Reed’s karate-trained harem and Dolemite’s love interests in the film. One could argue that it needn’t be 118 minutes, but I enjoyed each of them and could have kept watching when it ended. Most critically, I would say we get very little in the way of Rudy Ray Moore accounting for the unhoused people he got some of his first material from. He paid them in dollars and booze, but Dolemite Is My Name does little to make us think that their lives improved materially due to Rudy Ray Moore’s success. The movie also doesn’t talk about the decline of the Blaxploitation genre, and I feel like it doesn’t do a lot to remark on what the genre meant at the time, except to say that movies geared toward Black people tended to be a little more raw – more vulgar and smaller budget. Here, again, I want to recommend Trying to Get Over by Keith Corson. They picked at the term “blaxploitation” in the cast round table, but honestly its original use was about exploitation in the term of finding a new audience to sell movies to rather than cynically taking advantage of that audience’s culture. Now, the term morphed into that second definition by people unhappy with that portrayal, and they’re allowed to have their feelings.

Dolemite Is My Name does a great job of setting itself up within the 1970s – the clothes, music, and attitudes seem authentic. And it’s just a hell of a lot of fun. I will almost certainly be watching it again. Still, there are people with harder lines than me about who gets to tell Black stories, and I have questions about why a Black director and writer weren’t attached to this project, or weren’t allowed to be. I like to think that when you have such prominent and elusive actors as Eddie Murphy and Wesley Snipes attached, especially with the former among the producers, they have input on the script. And it is a good script. It’s a compelling and entertaining story about hard work, courage, and perseverance. It’s funny and it’s uplifting. I’m very happy to see a movie about Black folks succeeding. I just feel like they ought to be involved on every level of the production.