Compared to your standard day-time A&E biopic, Ray is fantastic. Were it not for warmly filmed period sets and a great performance from Jamie Foxx, it would feel very much like a standard made-for-TV-movie.

The storyline follows a general biopic pattern. We see Ray as he struggles to get started, gets taken advantage of, and then slowly but surely, rises to the top. The business deals are interspersed with the most enjoyable moments of the film as Ray rocks out in front of an audience as he pounds away on his piano. Unfortunately, these performances take up a good quarter of the film – they’re not that fun.

The larger problem with Ray is an interesting one. The film wants to be honest with Ray’s life in dealing with his vices (not to mention sensational so it can up its overall interest value), but it also wants to glorify him as much as possible. Despite his many successes, Ray’s life is, in many ways, a tragic one. It’s difficult to blend such tragedy with such success.

Ray’s born into hard times. He is reared in a poor black community in Florida. He has no father to speak of – his father has many other children with other women. His brother dies at an early age and he soon goes blind afterwards. His mother dies not much later. The story of Ray is a classic one. Here’s a man who rose up from the very bottom of the ladder and came out on top. It’s uplifting to see such a story.

On the other hand, Ray doesn’t seem to really rise above his beginnings. He becomes addicted to heroin, which the film spends some time with, and eventually present Ray as a hero for overcoming it. A more serious issue deals with Ray’s promiscuity and infidelity; he eventually has children with more women than his father. Ray’s life and music, in many ways, is presented as a sort of “liberation” or progressing with the times. There’s a constant clash between the hip and the old-fashioned, and the hip seems to win out.

Granted, the film is honest. The grief that comes to both Ray’s wife and other women is thoroughly portrayed, as is the drug problem. In fact, Ray is generally depicted as a rather selfish person. The depiction is often sad, sometimes humorous, and occasionally uplifting, all of which creates a fairly interesting portrait overall. That the film still wants to glorify him in the end, however, becomes a difficult task to accomplish. Despite the muddy troughs it must wade through to get there, it does accomplish it to a degree though – and to that extent it’s a positive experience.

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