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Much like his last project not to star teenagers, 1981’s One from the Heart, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Cotton Club (1984) is gorgeously rendered and has a narrative that, on paper, sounds like it will be emotionally heavy, even sweeping, given its scope. But the gorgeous rendering — in this case manifesting in a glittering, studied approximation of the 1920s and ‘30s whose glossy look thankfully doesn’t engender complementary romanticization of the period — is the thing about the movie that carries the most weight. The characters always feel remote. 

The Cotton Club flip flops between two narratives. One involves the torrid, dangerous love affair between a dashing trumpeter (Richard Gere) and the barely legal moll (Diane Lane) of a vicious gangster (James Remar). The other involves a Black dancer’s (Gregory Hines) dreams of something artistically bigger and dreams of a romance with a very-talented torch singer (Lonette McKee) who can pass for white. These two narratives never really coalesce, even though the connective tissue — this quartet’s shared connection to The Cotton Club — is interesting.

The Cotton Club existed in real life from 1923 to 1940 mostly on 142nd Street and Lennox Avenue in New York City; it reserves a contentious place in history. Although it prominently featured some of the premier Black talents of the era — Ethel Waters, Lena Horne, Louis Armstrong, and Cab Calloway among them — the club did not allow Black people to themselves patronize for most of its run. The vibe tended to be that of upper-crust white people spectating on Black art as if it were not that different from going to an exhibit at a zoo. Gawking, not genuine appreciation, was likelier.

Coppola shoots the film’s musical sequences lovingly, often thrillingly. There’s an exhilarating few tap numbers Hines performs with his real-life brother, Maurice; the movie gets a shiver of frisson whenever McKee belts. Jackée Harry cameos with a delightfully ribald song-and-dance routine. Coppola admires the caliber of talent that was amplified by The Cotton Club. But he doesn’t obscure the period’s ugliness in the process. Anti-semitism, anti-Black racism, and sexism intermix to become a miasma poisoning the air. The film’s areas of ugliness might be the trait outside its images that’s the most potent — the unwillingness to give in to the easy romanticization to match its luster. 

But the fact is that, in The Cotton Club, the gangster-drama element always feels slight, not helped by how Gere and Lane both don’t seem to be that comfortable playing these characters and don’t have enough romantic chemistry to root for their sure-to-be-lethal love connection. The stuff between Hines and McKee, meanwhile, is less slight and has much more dramatic potential but, because it’s the B plot, isn’t given enough space to really take off. The Cotton Club isn’t without great scenes. A favorite is the one where Fred Gwynne and Bob Hoskins, best friends when it’s unwise to be that kind of thing in the gangster milieu that employs them, spar angrily, then lovingly, after a kidnapping. It’s too nimbly acted and written a scene to describe in much detail here; what can be said is that it’s the one I can still vividly picture the most. 

I watched the “encore” cut of The Cotton Club — the movie as Coppola, who saw the theatrical cut hacked to bits decades earlier, wanted it to be — and though I’m sure it’s an improvement on something notoriously tampered with, it doesn’t strike me as a masterpiece at last emerging. If to put the film and “masterpiece” in the same sentence, it undoubtedly would be about what’s going on visually, which I can’t imagine wasn’t already true almost 40 years ago.