Notorious

Notoriousis a standard-issue rags-to-riches music biopic, writes MICHAEL DWYER

HAVE YOU ever had a moment so idle that you wondered why no one has made a movie about Cliff Richard, Celine Dion, Donny Osmond or Daniel O’Donnell? The answer, of course, is that they’re much too squeaky- clean to generate even a modicum of all the drama needed for a music biopic.

The formula, as acutely lampooned in last year's Walk Hard, generally reduces the lives of singers and musicians to a mix of the same basic elements: humble beginnings in childhood; the presence of an intimidating father or the absence of a father figure; the rapid rise to fame, as illustrated in a dizzying montage of spinning vinyl and record charts; the descent into drink and/or drugs; the marriage-wrecking infidelities; and a finale involving redemption or, more likely, a tragic early death.

We're on thoroughly familiar territory with Notorious, which begins at the end, on the March 1997 night when rapper The Notorious BIG was slain in LA at the age of 24. Cue an extended flashback and it's 1983, when Biggie is an overweight Brooklyn child known as Christopher Wallace (and played by the rapper's son, Christopher Jordan Wallace).

Biggie's absent father appears very briefly, but his Jamaican mother (Angela Bassett) dedicates herself to caring protectively for him. On the streets with his best friend, Biggie discovers early rap ( The Breaksby Kurtis Blow) and, a few years later, how lucrative peddling drugs can be.

Biggie serves time in jail and becomes a father by the time he's 19 (now played by Jamal Woolard), when he is signed by shrewdly ambitious entrepreneur Sean "Puffy" Combs (Derek Luke). He scores a hit debut album with Ready to Diein 1994. There's love and marriage with singer Faith Evans (Antonique Smith), and intense hatred and rivalry between Biggie and LA rapper Tupac Shakur (Anthony Mackie).

Under the unadventurous, by-the-numbers direction of George Tillman Jr, Notoriousis disappointingly conventional in form. As it follows a familiar trajectory, it's enlivened by the hip-hop soundtrack and it helps that the cast – in particular Bassett, Luke and Smith – bring vital presence and conviction to their underwritten roles.