Given the ostentatious and highly cinematic life lived by Ralph Waldo "Petey" Greene, a self-described miscreant-turned-straight-talking D.C. DJ, it's hard to believe we waited until 2007 for his biopic to materialize. Maybe it took having the right team in place: director Kasi Lemmons, screenwriters Rick Famuyiwa and Michael Genet, and stars Don Cheadle and Chiwetel Ejiofor, who shape the man in vivid, moving, and often hilarious ways. A film like this lives and dies by the performance of its lead, and Cheadle perfectly mixes the reckless bravado that made Greene fun to behold with the self-doubt that made him human. But unlike most biopics, Cheadle shares the screen with a co-protagonist, Ejiofor as Dewey Hughes, his manager and an eventual legendary disc jockey in his own right. Much is made about how each character's strengths complete the other. The same can be said for the actors, who play off each other terrifically; Ejiofor's role not only doesn't take the movie away from Cheadle, but actually gives it the depth to rise above the paint-by-numbers nature of many biopics. Some numbers do get painted in the second half, as Greene's life had a trajectory typical of a star who burns brightly, then flames out, consumed by his fatal flaw. But much more indelible are the scenes that stand out from a conventional narrative arc, such as Petey's impromptu late-night eulogy to Martin Luther King Jr., where the normally incendiary personality tried to extinguish the flames burning outside the building by urging rioters to heed Dr. King's message. Coming on the heels of a slapstick brawl between Greene and the DJ who just slept with his girlfriend, this scene only hints at how expertly Lemmons juxtaposes the comic and tragic portions that tugged for control of Greene's life.