titties, funny, and kung fu? By 1975, Moore would see his idea through with Dolemite, a bawdy crime comedy movie. It was released to fairly astronomical commercial success, and, today, is considered one of the touchstone features of the blaxploitation film movement.

 

Moore’s exploits are dramatized in the new Netflix movie Dolemite is My Name, and in the film do we have a touching and often very funny feature about self-made success. Eddie Murphy, in his first movie since 2016, plays Moore. Seen here is one of his best performances: Murphy spryly taps into his comic strengths while also uplifting the tenderness he can effectively employ when playing more earnest. Dolemite is My Name is also fortunately a feature that’s been put together as thoughtfully as Murphy’s portrayal — his work here is terrific, but it isn’t the film’s lone bright spot, as it goes for myriad biographical movies centered around excellent performances. (The film is enjoyable, too, for the sheer fact that we get to see much of the classically so-bad-it’s-good Dolemite reenacted. By the account of Dolemite is My Name, Dolemite was mostly a super fun movie to be part of, despite a handful of prominent behind-the-scenes troubles.) This is a heartfelt and observant character study of a success-seeking black man uninterested in letting his professional and personal pitfalls undo him. Moore, according to the film, was at once great at making real his aspirations while also being largely un-self-aware — making his late-in-life breakthroughs all the more rousing.

 

Dolemite is My Name has been written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, the screenwriting duo behind 1994’s Ed Wood. That movie — one of the greats of the ‘90s — also venerated an iconoclastic-in-a-questionable-way filmmaker, that being the eponymous director Edward D. Wood, Jr. Wood was responsible for some of the worst features ever made, yet for a time he churned them out with workman-like energy, as if their failures didn’t matter. Ed Wood takes delight in the way its eponymous moviemaking anti-hero was dedicated to his craft and didn’t seem to notice that what he was producing was objectively bad. You finish Ed Wood admiring its subject, and he endears himself to you, too. Here was this untalented artist who stuck with his craft and managed to find a subversive kind of success as a result. There’s a Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) T-shirt in my closet right now — a purchase many an orthodox talented director couldn’t inspire.

 

Wood is in no doubt comparable to Moore in a lot of ways: both are eccentric and oblivious to many of their shortcomings, but both possess a level of misguided confidence that winds up getting them somewhere — a trademark we come to love. Dolemite is My Name, like Ed Wood, evokes a similar kind of joy in watching a goofy man move about life. Life is a thicket of obstacles — a jungle of sorts — but even when the goings get rough it isn't so cool to take a break from hacking away.

 

The reason to see the movie, aside from its eye-candyish homages to blaxploitation filmmaking, is assuredly Murphy. His portrayal convincingly channels the paradoxical self-consciousness and boisterousness that in part defined Moore. But what I took to the most were the little scenes in the movie where Murphy’s Moore is alone in a room rehearsing a routine or monologue, sedulously working out how he’s going to deliver each word to an audience. A vulnerability shines through — a sense of can-I-pull-this-offness. I dug seeing Murphy — a comic performer whose schtick in itself radiates an envious self-conviction — so unusually raw. It’s also a bit poignant seeing Murphy, who hasn’t been in a movie for so long and until now seemed contented leaving his better days behind him, play someone

also in need of a screen victory after years of nothing.

D