Summer is the cinematic silly season, a time of gonadal teenagers and intergalactic robots masquerading as pickup trucks. As such, it can be a rough period for those looking for more serious fare. Anyone unwilling to wait at home until the fall-winter parade of Oscar hopefuls could do far worse than taking a look at Talk to Me, the biopic about iconic Washington, DC disc jockey Petey Greene. The movie has its flaws: At two hours, it's a bit overlong, and it occasionally slips into bathos or caricature, though never too deeply and never for long. But it features strong performances by an indisputably great actor (Don Cheadle, as Greene) and another who's shown flashes of greatness (Chiwetel Ejiofor, as his producer/manager/friend/antagonist Dewey Hughes). Moreover, it casts a sympathetic but unromantic eye on the turbulence of the late 60s and early 70s, and does so, atypically, through the eyes of black characters. The cultural touchstones are all there: Sidney Poitier and Muhammad Ali, Sam Cooke's "A Change is Gonna Come" and James Brown's "Say It Loud ? I'm Black and I'm Proud," and, most crucially and devastatingly, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The movie never feels narrowcast, though: It's a film not just about black America, but about America. It's also a film about Washington, and not the Washington you usually see in movies. No one in Talk to Me works for the President or at the Washington Post; there are no Secret Service details or clandestine meetings on the Mall or alien invasions. Rather, this is a story about Washington the community, a place where most people eat and drink and fight and make love and listen to the radio without worrying about the latest veto threat or campaign scoop. It's a place rarely shown on the big screen--one that even many of us who live and work in the city occasionally need to be reminded of. --Christopher Orr