MOVIE REVIEW : Music Pumps Life Into ‘Heartbeats’

“Take your time!” yells Robert Townsend to a gospel choir toward the end of “The Five Heartbeats” (citywide).

It’s advice he heeds himself. This erratic but often likable new movie--set mostly during the major pop rhythm and blues era of the ‘60s--is about a quintet who do five-part harmony and snappy dance moves, analogous to the Temptations, the Miracles--or the Dells, the movie’s technical advisers. It’s about five city kids who form a group that carries them to the top, before romantic rifts and cocaine tear them apart.

In a way, it’s pure schmaltzy show-biz stuff. It’s about friendship versus fame, the gang hanging together. It’s a mixed bag: some soaring hits, some flat and lugubrious misses. And Townsend takes his time as he tells it.

He lingers over details, performances. He revels in the flashy, impishly re-created choreography of the R&B; numbers (by Michael Peters), the parodies of moves by James Brown or the Temptations. He lets his cast--especially Michael Wright as the self-destructive lead Eddie King, magisterial Harold Nicholas, of the Nicholas Brothers, as an elderly choreographer, and Hawthorne James as ferociously exploitative record exec, Big Red--tear into their roles, rock ‘n’ roll around in their lines.

This film ambitiously tries to be classic musical comedy, show-biz saga and dramatic expose all at once. Like Spike Lee in “Mo’ Better Blues,” Townsend wants to give us the other, black side of the classic Hollywood sugar-and-acid show-biz saga. And, like “Mo’ Better Blues,” “Heartbeats” is a weird mix of hip and corn, grit and glitz. Townsend doesn’t have anything approaching Lee’s visual flair and style; he’s basically an actor’s director. But though his rhythms are slower than most young filmmakers, he usually makes the performances bristle.

When James’ Big Red explodes with rage and hangs an obstreperous performer head down off a hotel terrace, it’s hammy, but also a startling, mad moment. And despite its visual flatness, the movie has other moments like that--from Leon, Harry J. Lennix and Tico Wells as the other three Heartbeats (philanderer, family man and church boy, respectively), from John (Canada) Terrell as the narcissistic Flash, from Chuck Patterson as a doomed manager.

As writer-director-star, Townsend doesn’t hog the good scenes; he wants to give this movie an epic spread, make the Heartbeats both archetypal and personal. But he and co-writer Keenen Ivory Wayans, erstwhile gag writers, take sentimental short cuts: unlikely on-camera breakups, Sturm und Drang romantic triangles. In one scene, after the Heartbeats are rousted by racist cops down South, Townsend’s Duck plaintively begins a rendition of “America the Beautiful” and lets his voice crack predictably, right on the word “brotherhood.”

Musically, “The Five Heartbeats” is on target all the way. It’s hard to remember a recent film that had so many warm-hearted, rousing, big-souled song numbers. In these scenes--which Townsend plots into mini-dramas or comic sketches--the spareness of the visuals actually works to the movie’s advantage.

One of them really is a show-stopper: a comical routine where songwriter Duck keeps feeding lyrics to his baby sister, played by Tressa Thomas, a 12-year-old newcomer, who has the kind of amazingly robust pipes the child Judy Garland had. In “Hollywood Shuffle,” Townsend let loose a blizzard of wisecracks about the movie industry’s treatment of African-American talent. “The Five Heartbeats” (rated R for sex and language)--somewhat draggy and sprawling--doesn’t have “Shuffle’s” compact bite. But it does shine out with the filmmaker’s love of his subject. That’s its strength: wearing its heart, and those Five Heartbeats, proudly on its sleeve.

‘The Five Heartbeats’

Robert Townsend: Duck Matthews

Michael Wright: Eddie King

Leon: J.T. Matthews

Harry: J. Lennix Dresser

Tico Wells: Choirboy

A 20th Century Fox presentation. Director Robert Townsend. Producer Loretha C. Jones. Executive producer Townsend. Screenplay by Keenen Ivory Wayans, Townsend. Cinematographer Bill Dill. Editor John Carter. Costumes Ruthe Carter. Music Stanley Clarke. Production design Wynn Thomas. Art director Don Diers. Set decorator Samara Schaffer. With Diahann Carroll, Harold Nicholas. Running time: 1 hour, 54 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (sex, language).