Music Mensch
Woody Allen's tale of a jazzman runs the scales.

SWEET AND LOWDOWN
With Sean Penn, Samantha Morton
Written and directed by Woody Allen

JUST AS AMERICA FORGOT Leonard Zelig and Danny Rose, so have we forgotten the gifted '30s jazz guitarist Emmet Ray, who now exists only in the memory of aficionados who own his recording and musicologists who've written about his legendary life.

Thank goodness he also exists in the imagination of Woody Allen, who fabricated Emmet Ray for his new movie Sweet and Lowdown, a brief encounter with an artist who, as the title suggests, had two sides to his restless personality. Better than Broadway's clamorous Danny Rose -- what Allen movie isn't? -- but not as rewarding as his magical Zelig, Sweet and Lowdown finds the writer/director indulging himself once again and not quite getting anywhere, providing just enough entertainment to make it work.

Sean Penn, whose acting of late has blossomed exponentially, portrays the talented, hapless, boozing, womanizing, irresponsible spendthrift Emmet Ray with an impeccable mix of unwitting charm and unimpressive danger. The British actress Samantha Morton is equally fine as Hattie, a mute laundress who captures Emmet's attention for a while, and whose inability to speak allows Morton to perform exclusively with her expressive gamine face.

The music is pure and wonderful to hear, and while Penn obviously learned to play the guitar vigorously for his role, Allen hired real jazz musicians (predominantly Howard Alden) to play on the soundtrack. His long-time production designer, Santo Loquasto, recreates some lush urban street scenes of the '30s, and cinematographer Zhao Fei, working for the first time outside of China, gives the film a gentle melancholy glow.

With the exception of Uma Thurman, who performs her small role with tortured flamboyance, Allen's collaborators do good work in the service of a fairly superficial piece of comedy/drama. Sweet and Lowdown is often funny and touching, and you certainly can't quarrel with the music, from popular tunes like "Just a Gigolo" and "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles" to some rarely heard performances by Django Reinhardt, whom some consider to be the greatest jazz guitarist ever. (Emmet faints when he finds himself in Django’s presence.)

But as Emmet rants and moans about his own musical genius, and as the people around him explain that he's so emotionally detached from humanity because he pours all of his feelings into his art, you can't help thinking we're really only hearing Allen once again justify his own anti-social life, this time set in a musical milieu we know he loves.

There's certainly nothing wrong with an artist doing that. It's just that Allen doesn't build an especially interesting movie around it. Sweet and Lowdown begins with a few Emmet Ray "experts" -- Allen among them -- addressing the camera and telling some tales. It ends with a broken heart, just like Annie Hall, which remains Allen's most complete movie. In between, his plot lingers over bittersweet romance and eventually takes a dour Danny Rose turn. All the while you keep waiting for Allen to get more deeply into the musical passion of Emmet Ray instead o f merely making us listen to people talk about it.

This is lazy writing on Allen's part, and you get the feeling he only wanted to put some of his favorite pop and jazz music on film. As Emmet bellows about his greatness, getting drunk and blowing off gigs because he decides he'd rather be someplace else, it seems like Allen wants us to believe a great artist doesn't necessarily have to be a good human being. He makes this point so often that you begin to wish he'd knock off all the metaphors and just make a movie about a fiftysomething filmmaker who falls in love with his teenage stepdaughter.

For all of its neurotic urbanity, the finest moment in Sweet and Lowdown takes place in a small town in the Heartland, where Emmet stops on his cross-country drive to Hollywood. In the town’s meeting hall, he enters a talent contest in which he competes against a musical saw, a bird caller, and a husky coloratura who sings an inspirational song badly. When Emmet gets up on stage, the yokels all expect to hear another good-hearted wanna-be. Instead, they hear what will probably be the greatest musical performance of their lives. Only in that moment does Allen begin to suggest the power of artistic brilliance - and the compelling need we all have to experience it.