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Certainly there is enough going on. The story centers on two pairs of brothers and two troublesome women, and surrounds them with the ricochet rhythms of tap dancing and gunfire. The white brothers are the Dwyers: Dixie (Gere), a cornet player soon to turn Hollywood actor, and Vincent (Nicolas Cage), a bad boy heading for gangland death. The black brothers are the Williamses:
Dancers Sandman (Gregory Hines) and Clay (Maurice Hines), who secure a spot on the stage of the Cotton Club. Dixie's girl is Vera Cicero (Diane Lane), the satiny moll of Mobster Dutch Schultz (James Remar); Sandman's girl is Lila Rose Oliver (Lonette McKee), a light-skinned torch singer with aspirations to make it in the great white way. To lend some resonance to their characters, Coppola and Co-Author William Kennedy (whose tough-guy novel Ironweed won a Pulitzer Prize) have merged them with real-life figures of the jazz age: Bix Beiderbecke, George Raft, Texas Guinan, Lena Home. But the parallel stories do not effectively intertwine; they simply pass in the night like city strangers with menace in their eyes. There is too much geometry here, and too little chemistry.
Around the edges of the tableau vivant one can detect signs of life. Julian Beck, the grand old mandarin of the Living Theater, is a cadaverous hoot as Dutch Schultz's gunsel. The snippets of Cotton Club choreography have a sprightly sass that busts out of the archive; and there is a lovely scene (though indifferently shot and synced) featuring a dozen hoofers led by Charles ("Honi") Coles. Two witty montages-all headlines, quick cuts and oblique angles-portend an exciting future for their creator, Gian-Carlo Coppola, the director's son. And Father Francis ends his movie with a delirious crosscutting of the Cotton Club and Grand Central station, happy white folks and happy black folks, Hollywood fiction and a sense of fantasy all his own.
There are pretty slim pickings, though, when the lead actors perform their love scenes as if at gunpoint, and the characters are lacking in charm or moral weight, and the climax is lifted, without improvement, from The Godfather, and the "period" color makes the screen look as if it is coated with plaque. The Cotton Club is not a bad film, just a bland one; not inept, just inert. Given its garish production history, one rather expected The Cotton Club to sing with hot-jazz desperation. Instead, we get the mediocre craftsmanship of a pit band in Vegas. -By Richard Corliss