One suspects Martin is a convert, one who might have come to the blues unconvinced but came away a fire-and-brimstone evangelist for the music and its people - which is good, because an overfamiliarity with the minutiae might have strangled what is, on a very basic level, a solid story. Bookending narration provided by Cedric the Entertainer, seriously miscast as the great songwriter Willie Dixon, tells the story of Chess’ expansion, his paying off of disc jockeys, his fostering of the unstable Little Walter, Waters’ marriage to steady, long-suffering Geneva Wade (Gabrielle Union), the clash between Waters and Howlin’ Wolf (by all accounts one of the most ferocious blues performers ever - and Walker makes you believe it), and the eventual signing of the troubled James (Knowles), whose “At Last” becomes one of the label’s real crossover hits. He also starts recording Waters, whose “I Can’t Be Satisfied” puts them all on the map. Chess does the smart, politic thing and hires the invaders. They take over the stage, fists are thrown and someone pulls a gun. “It’s a dangerous business you in.” No kidding: At the Club Macambo, where Chess starts booking local talent, the so-called Headhunters barge in - Waters, harmonica virtuoso Little Walter (Columbus Short) and guitarist Jimmy Rogers ( Kevin Mambo). “I’ve lost daughters to bluesmen,” they warn him outside the black nightclub he plans to open. Working off her own well-researched screenplay, Martin goes so far as to have Chess’ path crossed by shadowy, muttering figures. In “Cadillac Records,” Adrien Brody cuts an appropriately oily figure as the man who founded Chess Records in 1956, while Wright delivers a performance of eloquent, simmering dignity as Waters - the first Chess star, one of the great vocalists in American music and the dramatic engine of Martin’s film. The second feature this year to focus on the same musicians, “Cadillac Records” takes a far broader approach than Jerry Zaks’ “Who Do You Love,”‘ which concentrated more on the conflicted character of Chess than on the artists he hired, promoted, profited from and, some say, exploited.

Cadillac records artists