Ray

""If you wanna do something to make Mama proud, promise me you'll never let nobody turn you into no cripple. You won't become no charity case. An’ you will always stand on your own two feet.""

The 2004 Biopic based on the life and career of R&B musician Ray Charles, who passed away shortly before its release. The film is dedicated to him.

Jamie Foxx plays Charles as the film shows him from his humble roots in Florida as he became blind, to his first performances in clubs, to reaching mainstream success in the 1950s and the 1960s with his unique blend of Country, Gospel, Jazz and Orchestral influences, all while dealing with racial segregation, his blindness, and a heroin addiction.

The film was a huge critical and financial success, earning Foxx the Academy Award for Best Actor.


 * Dead Little Brother: Ray is horribly traumatized by the death of his little brother George, who drowned in a washbin.
 * Scare Chord: When Ray's brothers arms come out of the wet suitcase.
 * Screw the Money, I Have Rules: Ray gets banned from performing in Georgia because he refuses to play for a segregated audience. The ban eventually gets lifted (though it also never existed in the first place in reality).
 * Straw Character: The venue owner that Ray walks out on. In reality the owner would have been as powerless to desegregate the audience as Ray was (something the movie attempts to obfuscate by only referring to Jim Crow laws once, and otherwise simply calling it "Jim Crow", as if it were a social construct instead of a government-imposed law), and would have lost quite a lot of money due to Ray's walking out on him just because of something he had no power over. The movie removes all this nuance to the actual history by simply having the venue owner be a walking stereotype of a rich white Southerner, whose only motivation for suing Ray is apparently "How dare a black man not do what I tell him?!"