This should have been a much better film. It is the fictionalised story of Ralph "Petey" Green, an ex-con in the Washington of the Sixties who became a famous radio jock by trying to tell it like it was in tumultuous times, and asking his fellow black Americans to talk back to him.

He did a large amount of charity work for the poor, was credited with calming the city after the assassination of Martin Luther King but was also a drunk and an inveterate womaniser who died of his excesses at the age of 53.

Kasi Lemmons's film has the benefit of fine performances from Don Cheadle as Green and Chiwetel Ejiofor as the executive who gave him his chance and went on to become his manager. But it only occasionally gives us much of an idea as to why Green became so popular, and never looks with sufficient depth into his slightly weird street-cred persona.

The episodic character of the film, which covers some 20 years, doesn't help. What Lemmons leaves out seems likely to be just as important as what he leaves in, and there's a lot of clumsy direction which stops Cheadle and Ejiofor deepening their characterisations.

A stronger screenplay and more sensitive direction would have made this movie into something far more genuinely uplifting than it is.