Cradle Will Rock

(Buena Vista)

Writer/director Tim Robbins weaves together several stories of Depression-era New York arts battles, including Nelson Rockefeller's demolition of Diego Rivera's anti-capitalist mural at Rockefeller Center and composer Mark Blitzstein's attempt to stage his pro-labor musical The Cradle Will Rock. Robbins is capable of explaining complex political material (Bob Roberts, Dead Man Walking), but here he reduces most of the characters to cartoons: fatuous plutocrats (including John Cusack's Rockefeller), egotistical artists (Rubén Blades's Rivera, Angus MacFadyen's boorish Orson Welles), and salt-of-the-earth saints (Hank Azaria's Blitzstein, Emily Watson's Olive Stanton, the homeless waif who starred in the play). Stirring as the climactic, against-all-odds staging of Blitzstein's play is, it reminds us (as does the film) that anti-authoritarian art is much easier to defend when the artist doesn't ruin it with shrill polemics.