I was first turned on to Ray Charles in the late ‘60s by a father's friend who toked me up in the rumpus room and strummed Born to Lose and Worried Mind on his six-string. Considering this was Edmonton and white suburbia, I guess you could say Charles songs crossed musical and racial lines, if not time and space. I thought he was cool and still do. I'm not such a big fan of Ray, the movie.

Ray is not a bad movie. It's just a ‘B' movie with an ‘A' movie budget. It has strong performances by the actresses and Jamie Foxx has down every Charles smile, twitch, bob and weave. It's an amazing replication. The script, however, is not up to scratch.

Director Taylor Hackford uses every standard bio-pic film-making technique to cover up a story almost devoid of tension. There's expository montage after montage—in fact, the whole movie is a montage that stops occasionally for ‘important' scenes that mostly klunk onto the screen; there are the editing tricks: pull and push wipes, circle wipes (where the scene ends, disappearing into a pin prick and then opens wide into the next scene), and dissolving pans, as one shot morphs into another. The idea is to create movement so that you don't choke on, or hopefully notice, the reams of biographical information thrown your way.

This is not new to Hollywood bio-pics. For example, in look and feel Ray is startlingly reminiscent of The Jolson Story (1946), a big hit in its time (including Al Jolson doing all the singing as Charles does in Ray.) But look at it now, and despite the great energy of the music, it's hokey. Okay, Jolson wasn't shooting horse, but he was self-centred and treated wives and friends badly just like Charles. Once the clamour has died down and the ‘Oscar' buzz is over, Ray isn't going to stand up well either. Not like, say, Lady Sings The Blues, the honest Billie Holiday bio-pic that has a strong emotional core and approximates the life of a poor, black musician from the American south.

Events speed by so quickly (the film covers 1948-67) that Ray has a Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland let's-put-on-a-show feel (e.g., Babes in Arms). Three examples:

In a corny scene, Charles steps off the Greyhound and meets a young Quincy Jones standing against a wall of a nightclub. "Hi, I'm Quincy Jones." Jones doesn't appear for another 10 years or so, when he gives Charles a 30-second brothers-have-to-stand-up-for-each-other speech.

In the intervening years, Charles has shown not one iota of interest in civil rights—actually more the opposite—when he puts his entourage back on the bus because a young, black demonstrator tells him it's the wrong thing to perform in front of a segregated audience. There's no reflection or struggle on Charles part. He just does it so we can presumably hurry on to the next big event in his life.

Particularly weak is (now legendary) Atlantic owner Ahmet Ertegun knocking on Charles' hotel room door and a few seconds later Charles ditches his current label for Ertegun. When Atlantic's (now legendary) producer Jerry Wexler sees Charles perform in-studio, Ertegun and Wexler, wide-eyed, get these goofy we've-got-a-star-on-our-hands looks. After a montage or three, the rest is history.

I don't know if it's intentional or not, or in fact is the truth, but Charles is shown as a by-stander in life. Right from the seminal moment when he watches his brother drown in a wash tub, through to the final battle with his heroin addiction, he's looking for other people to take care of his emotional and physical needs. Hackford hangs everything on the drowning incident, creating surrealistic scenes that torment Charles later in life and help drive him to put a needle in his arm. These scenes smell of creative license and result in melodrama rather than producing empathy.

Interestingly, the junk habit story-line didn't have a lot of emotional punch for me. It never got in the way of a performance or a recording session, or screwed up any relationships. (We all can treat other people badly without addiction as an excuse. Charles' mistreatment of others can be chalked up to selfishness and loneliness.) In fact, Charles kept telling people he didn't know what all the fuss was about. From what was depicted, it's hard not to agree with him. So what I'm saying (finally), is that the drowning accident as raison d'etre for the heroin use as the through line is a poor choice to drive the film.

Bio-pics of this fashion are really meant as passion plays—hardship, struggle and redemption—and, of course, to turn a buck. The subject and what the real truth is, is secondary. Let's hope a fitting documentary comes along that treats Ray Charles with the respect he's due.