Fresh Air - ‘Sinners’ Songwriter Raphael Saadiq

Episode Date: February 13, 2026

Singer, songwriter, and producer Raphael Saadiq is known for his work as a member of Tony! Toni! Toné!, as a solo artist, and for his work producing and writing for artists like Solange, D’Angelo, Beyoncé, John Legend, and more. “I Lied to You,” the song he co-wrote for the film ‘Sinners,’ has been nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Song. He spoke with Tonya Mosley. Also, we remember jazz clarinetist and tenor saxophonist Ken Peplowski. His playing was influenced by classical techniques, swing and traditional jazz.  Justin Chang reviews Emerald Fennell’s ‘Wuthering Heights.’Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Fresh Air. I'm David Bean Cooley. Raphael Sadiq is a Grammy Award-winning singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer. Something I've been going to tell you for a long time. It might hurt you. Hope you don't lose your mind. Well, I was just a boy. About eight years old. You threw me a Bible on my Mississippi rope.

See, I love your papa. Oh, you did all you can do. And they say the truth hurts. So I lied to you. The song I Lied to You, which he co-wrote with Ludwig Gorenson for the film's Sinners, is nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Song. It's a gospel blues ballad inspired by his own church roots and gospel upbringing and recurged throughout the film.

At the start of his career, Sadiq toured with Prince, playing bass in Sheila E's backup band. Then, with his brother and cousin, he formed the R&B band, Tony, Tony, Tony, and followed that with his R&B supergroup, Lucy Pearl. He's had numerous solo albums and singles. Raphael Sadiq also has built a career writing and collaborating with some of the biggest names in music, including Whitney Houston, Beyonce, Stevie Wonder, Solange, DeAngelo, Earthwind and Fire, and Erica Badu. Tanya Mosley spoke with Raffa. Al-Sadique last summer. You all are so well known in Oakland because that's where you then grew up.

When did you find your voice? When did you know that you could sing? I found my voice probably a Union Baptist, this church on 71st Avenue in Oakland, California. I was asked to sing a song with all the tiny touch had to sing a song on Easter Sunday and this lady named, called her Sister Nation.

She was the pastor's wife. She handed me a piece of, the paper and said, you're singing the song on Sunday. We got a chance to rehearse it one time, and then on Sunday, you're singing. How old were you? I don't know, seven. Yeah, yeah. And I was singing a song, and people started responding when I was singing.

The song was embarrassing that the words was his gospel sung. It was like, you know, if I was naked without bread or meat. And my friends was like in the audience crying, laughing. But when I sang it at church, people responded, like, oh, go, you know. And I heard it. But it more or less made me more nervous. You know, because they kept responding like I was doing a good job. Then I didn't do it anymore.

I didn't do it anymore until I played in some local bands and I was playing cover songs. I was singing by Mr. Mr. Broken Wings. I sing that like in the 12th grade playing bass and singing. I sing the single life by Cameo. Those were the next songs I sang and then pretty much I didn't like being a front guy. I didn't want to be a front guy. You didn't. No, I was playing in a band where there was two other lead singers,

and those are the two songs that I sang in the band. And when the Tony started, ended up singing Lil Walter, and the producers, Danny and Tommy thought that I should sing more songs, and that's how I became a front guy. So it wasn't always in the plan for you to be a friend guy. Oh, never. I don't want to be a front guy. I didn't want to be a fun guy at all.

I wanted to play bass for people who sing really good. and maybe be on a big tour. I mean, my dream would have been, like, early in my career to play for the Stones. You know, and just be gone, you know, play for some big group that does stadiums and just be gone. Which you actually had a chance to do that.

Mc Jagger asked you to play with them on the Grammys in 2011. Yeah, see, Solomon Berks, he had passed away, and they recorded one of his big songs. And I think his family, Solomon Brooks family called Mick. They're really good friends and ask him would he perform for their dad on the Grammys.

Mick thought to call me to assist him, and that was so cool because we got a chance to rehearse and play blues. He loves Holland Wolf and buddy guy, Albert King, and he's a blues guy, so it was like the younger blues guy meeting. another guy who was inspired by black people's music. You've always gravitated to music of previous generations.

You're like an old soul, like in modern packaging. What is it about that older music that you feel like is just always you've tapped into? It has a feeling. It has a feeling. And the late-great Isaac Hayes told me there's no such thing of old school. Is either you been to school or you didn't. Right.

I was schooled. The feeling of music doesn't change. So you want to get the feeling from way, way back, and you want to take that feeling and inject it to something new. I didn't know that I was doing that. It's just something that I got turned out on when I was a kid. You know, it's whatever you get turned out by when you're young is what you end up being. What do you love about the bass in particular?

Base made me feel big. I was so little, you know, probably 99 pounds when I was at it. Space has had this big sound. I heard it on Motown Records like Pride and Joy by Marvin Gay. I didn't know what I was hearing. And later on, I will find out I was listening to one of the greatest space players of all times. All times. Who was it?

James Jamerson. I want to ask you about a project that you just got done completing that we've all experienced sinners. What a movie. And you co-wrote the... the film's signature song, I Lied to You with Ludwig Gorenson. It's performed by Miles Canton. He's got like this deep, resonant voice that feels like it's come from another time. He's so young, but he's got like this really rich voice.

And that song that you co-wrote, it really serves as this emotional centerpiece for the film. It's a pivotal moment. First off, I want to know how did that opportunity come your way? Well, Ryan Cougal is from Oakland. I'm a huge fan of, you know, of the person that guy is. And then when this opportunity came, he called me and told me about it and told me what he was thinking about, gave me a synopsis of the film. And it was about blues and right up my alley.

You know, it's my background too. And they were about to leave the New Orleans to shoot it. And they gave me the story. And I'm thinking, when do you want it done it? And they were like, can we do it now? So I just start playing a guitar licking. I just wrote the lyrics right there. Let's listen to a little bit of it.

Something I've been going to tell you for a long time. It might hurt you. Hope you don't lose your mind. Well, I was just a boy. About eight years old. You threw me a Bible on my Mississippi rope. See, I love your papa. And they say the truth hurts, so I lied to you.

Yes, I lied to you. I love the book. That was the song I lied to you from the movie Sinners, which my guest today, Raphael Sadie Co. wrote. Tell me about that line, they say the truth hurts, so I lied to you. You wrote that, right? Yeah, I did, yeah. Yeah, tell me about that line. Well, that's a little mischievous boy line.

And, you know, I just think about if you lied to your girlfriend. And it's like, you're like, well, they say the truth hurts, so I lied to you. I didn't want to hurt you. So I just lied. I've always had that in my head, that concept of a song. Why? Why do you think, yeah. Because I thought it would always be a great blues song.

To take that big voice of Miles, yeah. Miles sounds like he's 60. Right? I know. He should have. Young dude, like 19 or something. Right.

So once Ryan told me about the movie. sort of changed the words around from what I thought I could say because now I'm thinking about a pastor, a father. Right, because in the storyline, it is Miles talking to his father who was a pastor, right. He's not telling the truth about his music. He loves his dad, but he loves music. He doesn't want to hurt his dad to say, I want to go play in this club

because I still love the Lord, I still love church. But dad, I got to go. Maybe I'll make it back. Is it true? I heard this. I don't know if it's true, but that you love soundtracks and scoring. Like, you'll be at home watching a movie or a show and then just start for yourself to think about a soundtrack or a song that be like the score. Yeah, if I'm watching a movie, I'll just turn the volume completely down and I'll start scoring. I start seeing what I would do versus what they're doing. That's how I kind of learned. Wait, can you give me some examples when you've done that? So there's a, hmm, there's a movie that's about this kid who played football,

is Syracuse. And Jim Brown was his mentor. And they had an Elvis Presley song in it at first, and they wanted this montage to happen when this kid is traveling from the east coast to the south. And when he reaches the south, there's all these black kids on the side with signs with his name. because in the South back in the day, you could run the football all the way to the five-yard line, but you couldn't punch it in for a touchdown if you're black.

I didn't know that. Right, so not in the South. Yeah. So the black kids were like chanting him on. They wanted him to run through and make a touchdown. So I had to turn that down and write a song over the top of that. And that was a song called Keep Marching. That was on the record.

This is called The Way I See It. my 60s album. And instead of me giving the song to the film, I kept it. It's the biggest licensed song I ever had. I want to talk to you just a little bit about your process and writing songs for other people, too. Beyonce's album, Cowboy Carter, won Best Country Album, an album of the Year at the Grammys. And you produced and wrote two of the songs, 16 Carriages and Bodyguard. Congratulations.

Thank you. You know, working with a Miss Beyonce is I know what hard work is, and I respect people that work hard. You don't even have to be around them to know. You could just look at the production amount of work they put into a show or when they come out with music or whatever. But being in the room and working with people, you really get to see how hard they work.

I've heard you say you don't remember the experience, but one thing you do remember is that you guys had a lot of fun. The good time is you're around a lot of great people, a lot of great thinkers. Everybody's a thinker in the room. It's sort of like I was at my studio for a lot of it on my own. But sometime I went to the studio where it was like five or six rooms in different people working in different studios. And you can go grab the dream out of a room, which is an amazing songwriter, producer.

Any musician is uncalled. I would just dream up, like, call this guy, call this guy. And that's how Quincy Jones would do it. you got to be able to have that book, that black book, to call the right musicians. And that's why music suffers to me now. You're not making a phone call, so everything sound the same. You're not giving different energy, different spirits,

different personalities on music. You need different personalities. It's not about you. It's about everybody else and then you. That's what made great records, and that's what the fun thing about Beyonce's record was. This particular song, Bodyguard, though, you presented that to Beyonce, but that wasn't necessarily the song. She can choose, and she chose that of yours.

Yeah, that song, I was going through my Dropbox, and I was playing songs in a room. She was in the room, Jay Z's in Room J, and some of the staff, and I was looking for a song. I don't think the phone was even hooked up to the speakers, and I played it, and I stopped it, quick because that's not the song I wanted to play. And I didn't think it was something she even liked. But she caught it in like two seconds. She goes, what's that?

And I'm going, oh, that's this idea that I had and I played it and she's like, what are you doing with it? And that's how it got on the record. I want to play a little bit of Bodyguard. And it actually is at the point where there's like the solo guitar. Let's listen. That was Beyonce singing

her award-winning song, Bodyguard. written by my guest today, Raphael Sadiq. That guitar at the end, that was also not planned, right? Is that you? Yeah, that's me. Yeah. She wanted a solo, B wanted a solo. And I did a solo, and she was like, can we make it longer?

And you never heard that from an artist in 2025, playing a guitar solo. They wanted longer. But she knows her audience, and she knows that is. rare and she's I think we could do that we can we can we can we can have a 16 bar solo on this record so that was a little bit of pressure to go back in there and play like a 16 bar solo yeah because I would have called my boy I would have called eric gales who is eric giles is one of the most amazing guitar players in the world today it's from Memphis Delta blues he was the guy just playing and he played a lot of guitar and centers but I would have called him yeah to play but he was on tour so I had to

played, you know, came on good. I love how I had to play it. Had to play it. Yeah. I like spreading it. I like spreading it around. Yeah. Um, I think that like something about that, about Beyonce choosing that song where you mistakenly played it, but then you're like, oh, and she says, no, what is that? I've heard you say, both she and Solange, because you wrote Cranes in the Sky for a seat at the table, um, her album, that they make choices like that. It's sort of like the mark of, a great musician is to go outside the box, the places that aren't safe.

It just made me very interested to know more about how you write these songs, many times they're for yourself. And then many years later, you might present them to an artist like Beyonce or Solange. You can tell about just how brave they are and how far they're going to go with it based on the choices they make on your selection. Yeah, yeah, definitely. I don't know. I guess it's in the water.

Houston, that family, both of them are like really particular about what they like as far as design, style, you know, staging. And you know what you can pull off. And it's not a lot of artists that take those chances. They take chances. And music is about taking chances, taking risks, lasting longer than your teacher or your executives or labels or anything like that. You For me, it's like, what chance are you going to take if you're playing music? You have to be, you have to dare to suck. And a lot of people don't do that. I don't fault people that don't do that.

But when you run into people that do, you have to know, like, I'm going to try. Myself, I'm going to try to not be different. I'm going to try to do something that I like first. And secondly, I hope it's the audience that likes it also. But first, I have to like it. Have you always been like that for yourself as an artist, Dare to Suck? I've always been like that. I didn't know what I was doing until I had to find the words later on through different people.

You know, Dare to Suck came from this acting coach that I was working with one time. And she's like, you've got to dare to suck. And I'm like, wow, that's pretty good because I did suck at acting. So, I was like, so that's a good point. I just took that and ran with that. Then I realized in music, I did that a lot because, you know, you're not always going to be good.

Acting. Well, I took an acting class because it wasn't for acting. It was for stage. I just wanted to get a little bit past myself. You know, I didn't want to be always thinking I was just artist, Raphael Sadiq. It's like, no, I wanted to get out that shell and just, you know, walk in a room with people where I wasn't good and where we have these different drills that we do that I was going to be pretty embarrassed to do them in front of people,

or read a monologue, and that's better people in the class, you know, way better than me. That was killing it. And I had to stand up in front of this class. I was like, wow. They're like, we have like five minutes to learn this piece. You got to read it in front of people. They're going to film you, and then the class is going to watch it back and critique you. That was the worst thing I ever heard my life.

And I did it, you know. I did suck, but I did it, you know. Is there a particular lesson from that that stuck with you that you use on stage now as just a part of your act? What I learned from it is, you know, you have to walk out there and, you know, take it all in. Especially, it really came to be a great part for my one-man show because it's just me. and I have to walk out to an audience where I'm not, you know, you don't hear drum roll in the beginning. It's just me. I open it up.

I say something to the audience. And they're used to me coming out, you know, t-t-t-t-tah-tah-pum, you know, it's not that. This is something else. And so I think, you know, I really like good acting. I'm a huge fan of like Most Death, Jeffrey Wright, Mr. Chito. Don Chito. Don, who takes that crap really serious. So, you do with music.

Like I do with music. Raphael Sadiq spoke with Tanya Mosley last summer. I lied to you. The song he co-wrote for the movie Sinners is nominated for an Oscar as Best Original Song. After a break, we remember jazz clarinetist and tenor saxophonist, Ken Poplowski, who died last week.

I'm David B. in Cooley, and this is fresh air. Ken Poplowski, the clarinetist and tenor saxophonist, whose career spanned from the Benner. Goodman Orchestra to decades of his own recordings and appearances, died last week. He was 66 years old, and he died aboard a jazz cruise ship in the Gulf of Mexico, in the hours between a morning lecture and a scheduled afternoon concert. Today, we remember Ken Poplowski.

BBC jazz critic Russell Davies called Poplowski, arguably the greatest living jazz clarinetist. Jazz pianist Emmett Cohen described him as a brilliant musician. a pioneer of the clarinet and a gentle soul. Born in 1959, Poplowski started playing clarinet professionally in Ohio at age 10 as part of a family polka band started by his father, a policeman. He joined the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra in 1980, then switched from clarinet to tenor sacks to play with the Benny Goodman Orchestra in 1984. After Goodman's death two years later, Ken Poplowski embarked on a solo career, focusing more on clarinet, working with a wide range of artists and recording more than 400 albums. He worked with Charlie Bird, Rosemary Clooney, Mel Tormey, and Leon Redbone.

When Terry Gross spoke with Ken Poplowski in 1999, he had just released a CD featuring songs and arrangements associated with his old band, the Benny Goodman Orchestra. The CD was titled Last Swing of the Century. The CD opens with the song Goodman Offense, used to open his concerts. Let's dance. Kim Poplowski, welcome to fresh air. Thank you. Nice to be here. Well, you actually played with Benny Goodman in the last part of Goodman's life.

How old were each of you at the time? This was about 1986, and I would have been 26 at the time, and Benny was around 80 years old. And I was frightened to death, frankly, working with him, because I'd heard. all these stories about him. And most of them weren't very good stories. I mean, he was known as kind of a terror on the bandstand, a very tough band leader. I saw a little bit of that, but I saw mostly a guy who was so obsessed with music that that took up about 98% of his life.

And that was probably the sole cause of a lot of, a lot of the complexities of his personality. Did you play clarinet or tenor? No, I played tenor. And, you know, there's a little bit of clarinet doubling. But I gave him some tapes that I'd done playing clarinets. And I guess that was the basis of him telling these people that they should record me.

But he never said anything to me about my clarinet playing except, you know, you sound good or, you know, those kind of things. but the first audition he auditioned Lauren Schoenberg's band his big band because he wanted to take a big band back out on the road

so he came to a rehearsal session we had and an hour went by and he didn't show up so we just started playing some charts and I was playing the clarinet parts and we're in the middle of an arrangement and I've got my eyes closed and playing a solo

and I could actually feel the band change and kind of tense up. Without even knowing that he was in the room, I knew he was there. And then, of course, everybody completely fell apart. But, you know, he wound up hiring the whole band. What's your attitude toward playing repertory music? Do you try to keep it true to the original recording or use the original arrangement or recording as a jumping off point? Actually, I take a...

kind of a different attitude. I don't want anybody to recreate solos to try to play specifically in the style of the old records. I may be alone in this because there's this big whole movement of everybody trying to sound like the old records, but to me, the way to keep the music alive is played in your own fashion

and show the audience that you love this music, but do it in your own way. Otherwise, you're true. treating the music like a dead music and treating it like a museum piece. And I don't want a concert to turn into a history lesson. I want the people to know that it's still alive. So all we did was use these arrangements as a jumping off point for us. And this is our way of playing these charts.

Ken Poplowski speaking to Terry Gross in 1999. More after a break. This is fresh air. Were you exposed to Benny Goodman records from your father's collection when you were growing up? Yeah, my father was an amateur musician. He was very surprisingly open musically because he was a very conservative guy otherwise. But we all, in the family, listened to everything from Benny Goodman to the Beatles, to classical music, to Polka music, which is my first professional job. and it all kind of goes in and goes into the computer there.

And so it was nice. And I still like to listen to all kinds of music. And I wind up playing mostly jazz, but I welcome some changes once in a while. But yeah, Benny was a big early influence. How did you end up playing clarinet? It's a funny thing. He, my father, brought home a trumpet

tried to play it, gave it up in frustration, gave it to my brother. He became a trumpet player. He next brought home a clarinet, tried it, gave it up, gave it to me. I got stuck with a clarinet, and I actually loved it almost from the beginning. And I always make a joke out of this, and I tell people I'm very lucky, and this is true, because the next instrument he brought home was the accordion. Did he play that himself? Yes, he did. You can get the letters from the the accordion players. So you started playing clarinet, your brother was playing trumpet, and then you played in polka bands together when you were kids.

Yeah, we played, we had a Polish polka band called the Harmony Kings. And I was, I think, around 10, and he was around 12. And we were like this little kids novelty act around Cleveland, Ohio. And we used to go on the local TV and radio shows. There was a TV show called Poca Varieties. And if you ever remember the SCTV show with the Schmengi brothers, it was so close to this show, it's frightening. But it's like learning how to swim by being thrown into the water.

That's how I learned how to play. You know, there we were having to play these long weddings and learn a lot of old standards in addition to the polkas. And the clarinet's function in that music is to improvise. so I kind of learned just by doing it on the job now imagine playing clarinet excluded you from playing in a lot of rock and roll bands yeah although we did do our version of proud Mary

with accordion and drums and clarinet that was a killer with the audience but yeah it did exclude me from that but I took up saxophone a few years after the clarinet because of that, actually, because it fit in more with rock music and with more of the old standards. So I did my share of different kinds of jobs around Cleveland when I was coming up. Ken Poplowski, you've studied classical music. And before we talk about studying classical music, I want to feature you playing a classical piece.

So let's listen to something from your CD, The Other Portrait. And this features you with the Bulgarian National Symphony. will hear you playing the first movement of dance preludes by the composer Vitaud Ludoslovsky. Clarinet is Ken Poplowski from his CD, The Other Portrait. Ken, did you study classical music because you planned on playing classical music, or did you do it just for help with your technique? A little bit of both. I had a great teacher early on in Cleveland, a man named Al Blazer,

who really impressed upon me the need to learn a lot of the classical approach to playing and how it would help everything I did. And it does. It helps with the breathing, with the phrasing, with the articulation of notes. And I always admired, even the jazz players I admired, had that classical side to them. Benny did, Jimmy Hamilton from the Duke Ellington Orchestra, Buster Bailey,

people like that. So I started studying all of that the supposed legit stuff. And because I was studying that, I decided to go on into college and go for a degree on the clarinet with the classical thing. Even though I always knew I would just play jazz.

But I mainly went to college just to keep studying with the same man because he was teaching at Cleveland state and I wound up going there for a year and a half and then I got a job on the road with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra and then that was it. How did it all went to pot? How do you think studying classical technique helped you playing jazz? Because again to it comes back to what I said before about Benny impressing upon us that

that sense of melodicism. You have to do the same thing. If you're playing a piece that is all written out that somebody wrote a long time ago, you have to put your personality into that piece of music. And you have to first learn the technique, and then the trick is to forget about the technique and just put some music into it.

And if you can do that with classical music, that's a big stepping stone to doing it with jazz. And I love that kind of a classic music, dark, round sound of the clarinet. It's such a beautiful sound that for me, that's what I strive to get, even if I'm playing something that's not classical. There's a piece of yours I want to play

from an earlier CD called The Natural Touch, and this is a clarinet bass duet, and the song is how deep is the ocean. And I don't want to play this, because I suspect that it really shows off some of the things that you learned with the help of studying classical technique, like the beautiful tone that you have.

And also some of the embellishments in your improvisation here sound like they might be inspired in part by some of the classical technique that you learned. Do you want to say anything about this before we hear it? Just that, well, you're absolutely right. Even now when I practice, it's mostly atudes, classical atudes, and it all is information that goes into everything you do.

So those little embellishments that you're speaking of do come right out of classical technique. Let's hear it. This is clarinetist Ken Poplowski. That's my guest, Ken Poplowski on clarinet with Murray Wall on bass from Poplowski's 1992 CD, The Natural Touch. And with your own band, a lot of the repertoire that you play is songs. You know, old standards, and it's almost wrong to call them standards, because a lot of them are songs that not that many people know. But they're real songs. They're not just like riff, riff-based things or heads that people play just to improvise on.

And I'm wondering what attracts you to song? Well, I have a very low boredom threshold. Honestly. And for me, if I'm bored, standing up there playing, the audience has got to be asleep. So I want to, the kind of records I like, you know, it's, there's something about all those old writers, they constructed these beautiful pieces of music

that told a whole story in 32 bars and they're very interesting harmonically they go to all these different places and there's so much material out there to draw on and I'm not a composer so what I do is interpret other people's material so I love to dig up old songs you're absolutely right.

Do you like to learn the lyrics of a song when you're going to play it so you can think about that? Yes, I really do. It doesn't mean you have to memorize every word, but I think it's important to learn what was meant when they wrote the song. And then you can take what you want from it. But if you're playing a ballad, it's nice to know what kind of a ballad it is, if it's a really haunting ballad or if it's a, you know, just a song to try to woo some young lady. and my goal, ultimate goal, is to accomplish without words, what the great singers accomplish using the words.

Well, Ken Poplowski, I want to thank you very much for talking with us. Oh, it's been a pleasure. Ken Poplowski, speaking to Terry Gross in 1999. The jazz clarinetist and tenor saxophonist died February 2nd. He was 66 years old. His final studio album was titled Unheard of, unheard bird and featured him on tenor sacks with string arrangements written for but never recorded by Charlie Parker.

Coming up, Justin Chang reviews the new film version of Wuthering Heights. This is fresh air. Emily Bronte's 1847 novel Wuthering Heights has been adapted for the screen numerous times. The latest version stars Margot Robbie and Jacob Allorty as Bronte's ill-fated lovers, Catherine and Heathcliff, and opens in theaters this week. It was written and directed by Emerald Fennell, the Oscar-winning filmmaker behind Promising Young Woman and Saltburn. Our film critic, Justin Chang, has this review. More than a decade ago, the new world. A worker published a piece titled, Can Wuthering Heights Work on Screen, in which my now colleague

Joshua Rothman argued that Emily Bronte's classic is beloved, not just for its romance, but also for its strangeness, its intensity, and its violence. These qualities, he noted, are often left out of the many films and miniseries the book is inspired, which tend to reduce the story to the doomed romance of Catherine and Heathcliff. The extravagant new movie Wuthering Heights, written and directed by the English filmmaker Emerald Fennell, is very much in this vein. It could be the most reductive version of this material ever made.

But I can't say I was ever bored. As she demonstrated in her wild satirical thriller Saltburn from 2023, Fanel cares little for subtlety. and here she's made an ode to mad, passionate excess. You could say she tells the story in broad brushstrokes, but I don't think she's even using a brush, more like bright red spray paint. And she's cast two stars, Margot Robbie and Jacob Allorty,

as a Catherine and Heathcliff you won't soon forget, even if their love affair is ultimately more photogenic than it is deeply moving. It begins in the late 18th century, Around the time that the young Catherine Earnshaw, who likes to run wild on the Yorkshire Moors, gets a new companion named Heathcliff, a scruffy urchin who comes to live with her and her father at their house, Wuthering Heights. Years later, and now played by Robbie and Allordy, Catherine and Heathcliff are extremely close, to the point of sharing a tense, quasi-incestuous attraction. It's clear they love each other, even when Catherine expresses her interest,

in Edgar Linton, a wealthy aristocrat who's moved in to a magnificent estate nearby. Look at it all. You must be very rich indeed. I suppose you shall fall in love with me. I suppose you shall fall in love with me. It would be nice to be rich. What should you do, Heathcliff? What?

If you were rich. Suppose I'd do what all rich men do? I live in a big house. It wouldn't be cruel to my servants. Take a wife. A wife? What wife? I've always worked funly on rolls from the Crown. The landlord's daughter.

She's quite the plainest girl I ever laid eyes on, and dull too, shockingly dull. She's practically a simpleton. I cannot sit here all day talking nonsense with you. After all, the Linton's may call on me at any moment. Catherine does end up marrying Edgar, played here by Shazad Latif. Heathcliff storms off in a fury, only to return several years later, with a fortune of his own, and a fierce desire to either reclaim Catherine or have his revenge. He inflames her jealousy by setting his sights on Edgar's impressionable young Ward, Isabella.

That's Alison Oliver, giving the movie's sharpest performance. Up to a point, this is how past adaptations, including the classic versions directed by William Weiler and Louis Bunewell. have unfolded. But Fennell wants to make the story her own, by infusing it with a hot and heavy sexuality that you don't typically see in a Bronte adaptation. Catherine and Heathcliff do a lot more romping in the rain than usual,

in scenes that Fennell stages for wicked laughs, as well as earnest emotion. But it's precisely in the realm of emotion that this Wuthering Heights falters. Elordie and Robbie are fine actors, and they do what they can to give this overheated movie a core of real feeling. But they are often overwhelmed by the sheer gargantuan excess of the filmmaking. The movie may be set in the 18th century,

but Finnell draws on a wealth of contemporary inspirations, starting with the soundtrack, which features several moody songs by the pop star Charlie XX. The production design and the costumes are full of Utre touches, from the bright red acrylic floor in one room of Catherine and Edgar's home to the Met Gallo-ready gowns that Catherine wears in scene after scene. She changes outfits so often that Robbie at times seems to be playing Barbie all over again. There's a reason for all this anachronism.

It's Finnell's way of saying that Catherine and Heathcliff's love story is so powerful that it transcends its period setting. But for all her bold choices, there are aspects of her. of this Wuthering Heights that remain hidebound and conventional, including its treatment of race. Over the years, there's been much debate over the subject of Heathcliff's

ethnicity. Bronte's book famously describes him as a dark-skinned gypsy, and he's often been held up as one of the few protagonists of color in Victorian literature. Not that that's kept him from being played by one white actor after another,

including Lawrence Olivier, Ray Fines, Tom Hardy, and now Jacob Allordy. One underappreciated exception is Andrea Arnold's 2012 version, which features two black actors, Solomon Glave and James Howson, as the younger and older Heathcliff. Casting choices aside,

Arnold's version is pretty much the antithesis of Finnell's, somber, downbeat, and grimly realistic. It's a tougher, but ultimately more affecting movie, and with Wuthering Heights fever having set in, now is as good a time as any to seek it out. Justin Chang is a film critic at the New Yorker. He reviewed Wuthering Heights, now in theaters. On Monday's show, as we celebrate President's Day,

Donald Trump's aggressive moves to expand the power of his office may be redefining the presidency. We speak with presidential historian John Meacham. His new book, American Struggle, is a collection, of important speeches, letters, and other texts from colonial times to today. Hope you can join us. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David B. in Cooley.