Dreamgirls
12A, 130mins

This is a huge week for two Oscar hopefuls in an alarmingly cluttered month. The release of so many contenders in quick succession has resulted in a cutthroat struggle for box-office attention.

Few pictures can match the glamorous pull of Dreamgirls. Bill Condon’s first big musical since Chicago is a glossy, gleaming Cadillac of a film with a vintage rhythm and blues engine tuned to perfection. The cast is dressed to kill. Even their wigs look fabulously expensive.

The story is as old as the Mississippi. Three young women called the Dreams sing their way from a Detroit club to the top of the American charts. They turn heads with their harmonies and break hearts with their solos. This is a musical that bleeds, and there is nothing smooth about the rocky trip to fame.

Based on Henry Krieger and Tom Eyen’s 1981 Broad-way smash, Dreamgirls is a surprisingly bitter parable about the painful transformation of a small black record company into a giant white-bread monopoly. It is a story about exploitation, crushed hopes and betrayal. It is also the murky, unfashionable history of Motown, the Supremes and Diana Ross.

The hollow villain is Curtis Taylor Jr (Jamie Foxx), an oily manipulator with velvet manners, a steely will and a suitcase full of cash. His unhealthy obsession with Deena Jones (a shimmering Beyoncé Knowles) works like poison. The musical comes to flaming life when Foxx demotes the lumpy lead vocalist, Effie White (Jennifer Hudson), to the chorus line of the Dreams and replaces her with Jones.

The logic behind the move is as obvious as Knowles’s shapely sex appeal, but Effie’s festering jealousy and resentment build to an extraordinary six-way aria in which singers, agents and managers turn on her and throw her out of the Dreams.

It’s a blistering performance by Hudson, who can dismantle brick walls with her voice. Her bleak and magnificent solo, And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going , is carved across the film like graffiti. It’s a piece of virtuosity I’ll take to the grave.

The disarming beauty of Dreamgirls is how dialogue slides into wrenching song or barnstorming blues. Eddie Murphy is the wonderful purveyor the film’s best dance numbers. He is a venal joy as James “Thunder” Early, an arrogant, vulgar fusion of James Brown, Chuck Berry and Marvin Gaye. The greasy black quiff that crowns his head makes him look uncannily like a performing phallus.

Like all musicals, Dreamgirls is prone to a handful of irritating conveniences, and millpond moments when the pulse all but stops. But Eyen’s libretto reaches far deeper than most musicals shaped by 1960s nostalgia. His elegy about how families are destroyed when monopolies begin is as true for the music industry as it is for the Mafia.

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