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IDLEWILD

Warning: 14A: Sexually suggestive scenes, violence, coarse language. 120 minutes

Grade: C

Theatres, showtimes, B18-19.

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The on-again, off again musical partnership of Andre Benjamin and Antwan Patton in OutKast gets a big-screen reinvention in Idlewild, with the hip-hop pair cast as jazz musicians in a 1930s, small-town speakeasy.

OutKast diehards can speculate about the movie's plot -- Benjamin as a piano player named Percival who eventually leaves his partner for new musical challenges in the big city -- as metaphor for the real-life relationship between Benjamin (a.k.a. Andre 3000) and Patton (a.k.a. Big Boi) themselves.

But writer-director Bryan Barber's uneven fusion of period gangster drama, animated whimsy and dance musical can't settle on a tone or style to keep anyone else watching.

Barber directed music videos for OutKast before making his feature debut on their movie. He brings flash and a host of influences to the long-form movie, but virtually nothing in the way of an attention span.

We meet mortician's son Percival (Benjamin) and apprentice bootlegger Rooster (Patton) as childhood friends who go on to play at a nightclub-brothel called Church, where Rooster is the headlining singer and Percival his accompanist. Rooster has a wife and multiple children whom he neglects for late nights after the show.

Percival still lives with his widowed father (Ben Vereen) and works days cleaning up and laying out the corpses for him, until an ingenue singer (newcomer Paula Patton) opens up other possibilities.

Rooster finds himself running the club after the club owner (Faison Love) is killed. He inherits the owner's problems as well, notably the extortionate attentions of a smoothly homicidal gangster (Terrence Howard).

Oscar-nominee Howard and some of the other cast, including Ving Rhames as a bootlegger, seem to be acting in a different movie from the one Barber is making.

That other movie, more of a straight-ahead drama that pays attention to its plot, is the one I'd rather be watching. And Barber displays the occasional deft, gritty touch -- like the big beetle that scurries across the mortuary's prep table.

But the gangster story takes a back seat to spinning camera flourishes and the musical duo's athletic showpieces, with a deliberately artificial production design and whimsical touches that include Rooster's animated, talking whisky flask, the musical notes frolicking across Percival's pages, and a chorus of cuckoo clocks ringing out above his bed.

Benjamin has already established an acting career apart from OutKast -- he was one of the few comic highlights of the otherwise tepid John Travolta sequel Be Cool, and he took a credible dramatic turn in the ensemble crime story Four Brothers.

After this lushly designed vanity project, the jury is still out on Patton's acting career.

Barber occasionally seems to be aiming for the anachronistic energy of Moulin Rouge with his fusion of hip-hop songs and dance moves to the 1930s jazz speakeasy, but that energy isn't there. And when Vereen shows up in a non-singing role as Percival's father, there's a sigh of nostalgia for the more successful blending of dark drama and song in Bob Fosse's All that Jazz.

Despite its aspirations, Idlewild can't match either of those movies.

gschaefer@png.canwest.com