PLOT: Biopic of Ray Charles, who overcame blindness and a heroin addiction on the way to becoming a soul pioneer.

If filmgoers have been paying attention to all the hype about Ray, the much anticipated warts-and-all Ray Charles biopic, being one of the best movies of the year, they're bound to be disappointed.

But before I tell you why, let me add my voice to the loud chorus praising Jamie Foxx, who is spectacular as the genre-defying, heroin-addicted, philandering singer-songwriter-pianist who basically created soul music.

For his startling transformation, the 36-year-old actor lost more than 30 pounds, donned eye prosthetics that rendered him blind, and adopted Charles' distinctive speaking voice and movements.

I have no doubt Foxx, previously best known as a comedic actor with a gift for mimicry from TV's In Living Color and The Jamie Foxx Show, will get an Oscar nod. How could he not? His career trajectory, with more serious roles in recent years in Any Given Sunday (1999), Ali (2001) and Collateral (2004), has been headed this way, and his breakout performance in Ray sweetly seals the deal.

Suffice to say, both his dramatic scenes -- and there are plenty -- and musical ones (he's lipsynching to Charles, although he is a singer-musician in real-life), are the reason to see Ray.

Unfortunately, director Taylor Hackford may have been a little too close to his subject -- Charles was involved in the making of the movie over the last 15 years before he died last June. The film clocks in at just over two-and-a-half hours.

Ray, therefore, often drags and feels like a blow-by-blow account of the soul icon's life when it should just fly by, considering all of the personal lows and highs and the rich musical material and performances that are inherent in the story.

A major problem is James L. White's heavy-handed script, which too often verges on melodrama. The defining moment of Charles' life -- his witnessing the accidental drowning of his younger brother, an incident which partly contributed to his blindness a year later at age seven -- is told repeatedly via a visual device that takes moviegoers out of the film when it should be drawing them in. (I don't want to give it away because the first time it happens, it is geuninely disturbing, but by the sixth time, it feels forced.)

Thankfully, in addition to Foxx's star-making turn, Ray is further bolstered by its supporting cast of strong women -- Kerry Washington as Charles' sweet but long-suffering wife Della Bea, and Aunjanue Ellis and Regina King as Charles' feisty backup singers/lovers Mary Ann Fisher and Margie Hendricks, respectively. Sharon Warren is also memorable as Charles' fiercely independent mother Aretha Robinson, who taught her young blind son in poor, rural Georgia to depend on no one but himself.

(This film is rated 14-A)

More Movie Reviews