Spirit in the dark

JAMIE FOXX walked into the old Ray Charles recording studios two weeks ago like he owned the place -- or at least like someone who knew the hallways well enough to find his way blindfolded. He had done pretty much that on his previous visit to the studio, in June 2003, when makeup people sealed his eyes to help him portray the legendary blind singer for the film “Ray.” The “blinding” involved an uncomfortable fake-eyelid application every morning for the three months of shooting. For 14 hours or so a day, Foxx was in his own darkness. “It was awful, but there’s no other way to do it. Ray couldn’t just open his eyes between takes. You can’t fake it,” Foxx said, rubbing his temples at the memory.

Acting is faking it, of course, but in truly inspired moments performance rises beyond mimicry -- and that is just the type of praise now circulating Hollywood as Universal’s “Ray” heads toward theaters Friday. The aura of the movie is particularly charged with soul-man Charles’ death here in Los Angeles the very same month that Foxx was filmed at the studio in the singer’s trademark sunglasses. Returning to the session room on the eve of the film’s release, Foxx said the intense role and his own fleeting relationship with Charles have left him with a jumble of feelings.

“This room is where we first met,” Foxx said at Charles’ studio and headquarters, which sits on a scruffy section of Washington Boulevard in L.A. that makes its vintage facade as out of place as a silk slipper on asphalt. That introduction was in summer 2002 and, to welcome the young actor, the lights were switched on in the usually dark session room. “The first thing he said was, ‘Ha, yeah, you got strong fingers,’ ” Foxx said of the handshake.

Meeting Charles was “inspirational, amazing” for Foxx, but it was also intimidating; Foxx wanted the title role in “Ray” but first he would have to pass the exacting standards of Charles by playing blues standards and Thelonious Monk compositions to the soul man’s satisfaction. “It was a musical obstacle course,” mused Foxx, who was classically trained in piano as a youth.

“I can play, but still ... we went back and forth that day. It was mind-blowing. It was spiritual. I remember I hit a wrong note and he stopped and he said, ‘Now-uh why did you go and do that?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ He laughed and said, ‘The notes are right there, right underneath your fingers. You just got to take a second and find them.’ And I knew he was talking about more than music.”

The arduous demands of the role and the intensity of the material were a stern test for a star known for television comedy and for less-hallowed cineplex fare such as “Booty Call.” Foxx is shifting to a new strata, though, after his acclaimed performance earlier this year in the thriller “Collateral,” which saw him hold half the screen opposite human lightbulb Tom Cruise. “Ray” may be the sort of ripe, defining part that sends him flying higher at a sharp trajectory.

Before all this he was a young star of his church choir and a pianist of sufficient talent to earn a college scholarship that took him up and out of dusty Texas. Like most Americans -- and especially like many black Americans raised in the south and near a pulpit -- the music of Ray Charles was elemental in his ears. Asked which Charles song he learned to play first, he just scoffs. “That’s like asking someone the first time they walked on grass. You don’t remember it. It was everywhere. This is a legend we’re talking about.”

A legend that is beloved to America but also one that may be viewed differently after the release of “Ray,” a film that will not surprise the world with the quality of its soundtrack but may shock some with its shadows. To be blunt, America may like Charles less and respect him more after seeing streaks of bitterness, complexity and reckless excess that run counter to the beloved, smiling image of Charles.

The film goes back to the heretical young singer who arguably changed the course and texture of pop music with his mold-breaking recordings -- his melding of gospel and its uplift with earthy R&B; themes and attitude created what is now called soul music -- and its greatest challenge was to find a lead actor who could actually match the incandescence of the real Charles. The piano skills didn’t hurt either. It took more than a decade for the film to reach the screen for many of the typical and uninteresting Hollywood reasons, but that lag time became a huge boon to the film. Had it got off the ground any earlier, Charles would have been shaking hands with the wrong actor.

“That first day he said to me, ‘If you can play the blues you can do anything,’ ” Foxx said, repeating the quote in an imitation of the singer’s unmistakable, pinched, cool-cat speaking voice. “And we both just sat down at pianos.”

Nailing the part

The test, of course, went well; not only does Foxx star, but the early notices for his work have been laced with talk of Oscar prospects and “role of a lifetime” reviews. Foxx acknowledges that on some level he feels that “this is my big shot right now.” It’s clear he and the film’s director, Taylor Hackford (“An Officer and a Gentleman,” “Proof of Life”), and screenwriter James L. White did not take the task of portraying Charles lightly. Hence the severe affectation of blinding Foxx every morning.

The darkness that Charles endured since age 7 was unnerving for Foxx even if intellectually he knew it could be peeled away at the end of the day. “It was like getting claustrophobia in your own body. I would get really anxious and feel like I was trapped.... If you close your eyes for a few minutes you still know where things are around you, but then after a few hours you lose everything.”

The sensory jolt led to more than a few bad falls on the set and the occasional growling stomach (“They would call lunch and everyone would go and I’d still be sitting there, like, ‘Hello?’ ”). Foxx said he channeled the extreme feelings and the physical nuances into the performance. He augmented that with his studies of Charles as a locomotive specimen -- not only the head-bobbing grin and arm-hugging posture but also the clipped, heel-tapping gait and shuffle of the singer, who used to gauge the distance of walls and furniture by the echoes of his footfalls.

In the darkness too, Foxx found that even as a trained musician he had never heard music the way he heard it in the void. “The music seemed so big after a while.” Perhaps that explains why Charles himself devoted a good chunk of his philanthropy to the deaf and hearing-impaired. The singer said often that music is what got him through the day and, more desperately, through the night.

“In this movie I tried to play Charles’ music throughout his whole life, the good and the bad, the triumphant and his downfalls, his recoveries,” Foxx said. Foxx shed 40 pounds for the role and would be hard to recognize for any “Collateral” viewer who didn’t notice the credits. David Ritz, the author who collaborated with Charles often and notably, has seen the film twice and both times found himself in awe of Foxx’s on-screen creation of Charles.

“As someone who knew Ray for nearly 30 years, someone who worked with him day and night on his autobiography and studied him as closely as I could, I was amazed how Jamie captures not only his quirky talk, his quirky gestures and his idiosyncratic personality but Ray’s powerful physicality as well,” Ritz said. “Jamie’s phenomenal. He found a way inside Ray’s soul.”

The soul of Charles is, in its publicly displayed regions, part of American history. Charles was a singular force in music who created a run of records that crossed from the 1950s into the 1960s and through their crackling energy defied genre and convention. Twisting genres on their head at a time when Southern culture was trying to keep bright lines between its communities, the blind man born in Georgia earned the title “the Genius,” and, for once, it was a moniker that was more than just some announcer’s sales pitch.

The soul of Charles in his private life, however, was a battered thing. The film shows a man who endured a melodramatically painful youth, got swept up in turbulent historical times and burned himself with his own fiery excesses. The young Charles may be best remembered as the boasting street-corner Romeo of “I Gotta Woman” or the incredulous tomcat in “Hit the Road Jack,” but Foxx hears the Ray he knew most sincerely in the yearning, frenetically paced “Mary Ann,” a song about “the temptation he felt, the things that pulled on him.” Foxx belted out every song that appears in the movie to enhance the lip-sync illusion since the original recordings will surge out of the movie-house speakers. It’s the quieter moments when Foxx worked hardest to inhabit the character.

“That’s the trap, and if you can’t mimic him to a certain extent you might not get the role,” he explained as he tapped away on a piano bench. “But you can’t play Ray Charles and do it just as imitation. That music has to be in you, you have to know it and feel it. You have to be a musician because that was his life. His married life, really everything that happened offstage, all that was his downtime.” It was on the offstage moments of the story that Foxx focused his actor’s intuition on most intensely. “That’s because when Ray was on stage and in public, he was imitating himself in the way that he was presenting what people expected. I spent hours watching tapes of him relating to his fans, the people that worked for him, the way he ordered his food, the way he acted with his glasses off

Turning back the clock

Foxx added swagger-speed to the Charles movements he recorded with his eyes and his video camera -- after all, he was spending time with a singer in the final stages of a 73-year life. “I added the vigor of a Ray who just got his first check, just got the taste of success and the one that knew he was carrying something special.” Charles was a complicated man with an edge to his personality and a willingness to trade much for his success (“This was not,” one of his longtime associates said recently, “a guy that was going to win father of the year” for his many children).

Foxx himself is confident to the point of cocky, recently telling Time magazine that his presence on Earth was preordained and possessed with a mission to “inspire a generation.” As an entertainer, Foxx may be a generational throwback to past decades when versatility trumped specialty. In the hourlong conversation at the studio, he sang an R&B; song for the lady friend who accompanied him; he launched into pitch-perfect imitations of Charles, Quincy Jones and music mogul Ahmet Ertegun; and even gave an impromptu reading from the script of his upcoming film, “Jarhead.” In that film, he portrays a Gulf War sergeant shaped by military regulations and inner-city savviness.

“Ya know, I’ve been busy.”

“Ray” arrives at cinemas where they are still sweeping up the popcorn from “Collatera,” and with bouquets of affection still landing on stage for the late singer. There’s a network television tribute (Foxx was a host) that aired this past week, and “Genius Loves Company,” an album of Charles duets, now hovers near the top of the pop charts. There’s a soundtrack for the film too, and inside the photo facing the disc is a remarkable picture of Charles and Foxx, both in sunglasses, both laughing, that accentuates the likeness they share even across generations.

Tragedy strikes early

Charles grew up dirt-poor in the South, where six days of the week beat a soul down but Sunday morning songs were enough to shake the red clay off for another try. Charles knew deeper pain than most -- not only losing his sight at age 7 but suffering deep wounds to his psyche as an adolescent when he was a witness to his brother’s death.

Foxx’s youth was, by comparison, a nurturing and secure sphere, but that’s not to say it was standard issue. The woman who gave birth to him in 1967 sized up her life and, seven months later, agreed to let her own adoptive mother become the baby’s mother by law and life-role. Foxx’s new mom was 60, but her life was still full of lullabies; she ran a nursery and day care and with her doting attentions Foxx became a precocious and plucky youngster. Foxx became not only a Friday-night hero on the high school football squad but on Sundays he was the star player in the church choir and had become a piano player of polish enough to pay his teen bills by hiring himself out to wine-and-cheese parties in need of ambience.

His path after high school took him from Terrell, where “being in Texas, it was, really, just white folks on one side of the tracks and black folk on the other side,” to the breezeways of United States International University in San Diego, a campus where 80 classmates gave him a head-expanding lesson about world culture. The talented kid grew confident and, in 1989, he was feeling good enough to take a dare and walk out onto the stage of the Laugh Factory on the Sunset Strip. His ear for notes made him a mimic of sizable range, but it was his intellect that set him apart in the smoky club gigs that followed that lark. Then came television roles -- “In Living Color,” “Roc,” his own “Jamie Foxx Show” -- and then on to movies.

Four years shy of 40, Foxx this year may change his Hollywood classification from the general territory of David Allen Grier to the more rarified landscape of Denzel Washington. Especially if Hollywood comes up with more leading roles for black stars. He remains one of the most bankable comedians on the scene, and Clive Davis, the music mogul who learned from “American Idol” the potency of television and multimedia branding in record sales, has recently signed Foxx for an album that will come out next year.

“I still have Ray in me, though, which is to say, you can’t walk away from him or a movie like this,” the actor said. “I mean, I feel like I have karma now from him. My sister says I act different. She says it’s like I have something in me now. Ray Charles is something that should be in all of us. Anybody can see that, right?”