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Verdict: Slight but likable if you can get past the self-justification.

Details: Starring Sean Penn, Samantha Morton and Uma Thurman. Directed by Woody Allen. Rated PG-13 for profanity, sexual situations and alcohol abuse. 1 hour, 35 minutes.

Rate it: Write your own review

Review: You remember Emmet Ray, don't you?

Of course you don't. Emmet Ray is a fictional character, a legendary jazz guitarist from the 1930s, invented by Woody Allen for his new mockumentary, "Sweet and Lowdown."

According to Allen, who appears with a number of other talking-head experts as part of the film's conceit, Ray (Oscar® nominee Sean Penn) was an eccentric genius who liked to shoot rats in garbage dumps and watch trains for hours. He was also a great guitarist, second only to genuine Gypsy legend Django Reinhardt, in whose presence Ray has fainted. Twice.

What we essentially learn about Ray is that, outside his music, he was a selfish, womanizing, alcoholic, egotistical louse. But with a guitar in his hands, he was transformed into a muse, an artist, an angel of jazz. He sleeps with women, but his true love is music. Notes one character before taking up with him, "He can only feel pain through his music. Such is the ego of genius. I must get used to it."

The woman who almost changes his life is as sweet as he is lowdown. She's Hattie (supporting actress Oscar® nominee Samantha Morton), a waiflike mute who suggests the girlish heroines of the '20s — the Gish sisters or Mae Marsh. Or, more eerily, Mia Farrow in some of Allen's own films. But Hattie and Emmet's romance is derailed. By his ambition, his unreliability, his abusiveness and, most specifically, by a swank-looking debutante (Uma Thurman) with pretensions of being a writer. She's not kidding when she says with unadorned awe, "Not only are you vain and egotistical, you have genuine crudeness."

"Sweet and Lowdown" is slight and, as a faux documentary, it can't begin to compare with Allen's immortal "Zelig." But Penn, who thankfully chooses not to do a Woody impersonation a la John Cusack in "Bullets Over Broadway" and Kenneth Branagh in "Celebrity," is superb. He smartly suggests that there must be something inside this swine that allows him to create such beautiful music, but he leaves it a mystery. Mostly, he's pure, swaggering pork.

Morton is touchingly delicate in a pretty ridiculous role, and Thurman, for once, seems confident in her work, not her looks.

Unfortunately, there's still a whiff of Woody self-justification. It's as if he finally got to write his essay about the artist vs. the man and the whole Mia/Soon-Yi debacle. His wife, Soon-Yi Previn, may not be mute, but "Wild Man Blues" showed that she is hardly a marvelous conversationalist. And when Ray rails "I made a mistake" near the movie's end, you can't tell whether it's an apology or a shut-up-already.

"Sweet and Lowdown" is middling Woody. It looks good, thanks to Zhao Fei, who used to work with Zhang Yimou ("Raise the Red Lantern"). And it sounds good, thanks to guitarist Howard Alden, who makes Penn's music. If a ranking is helpful, it's far better than such recent work as "Celebrity," "Everybody Says I Love You" and "Deconstructing Harry." But compared with Allen's work in the late 1970s, '80s and early '90s, it's just a jazzy little doodle of a picture.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, Cox News Service

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