Created by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and approved by Congress in 1935 as a part of the New Deal, the U.S. Works Progress Administration was one of the most important work relief programs in history, providing jobs for the vast legions of the unemployed affected by the Great Depression.  Later renamed the Works Project Administration (or WPA), the organization created over eight million jobs between 1935 and 1943.  But, oh, the havoc it wreaked on the creative community.

Cradle Will Rock takes place in 1930s New York City.  The Depression has kicked into high gear, the red scare is well under way, and fat-cat business owners are dreading the loss of production due to impending union strikes.  The film is careful to show the effects of the times on a wide array of New York citizens, covering every rung on the social ladder from the homeless to (literally) Nelson Rockefeller.  Yet all seem to be wrapped up in the Federal Theater Project (FTP), a WPA venture intending to organize and provide work for unemployed theater professionals - from actors to stagehands - while bringing cheap entertainment to the masses. 

The many characters of this film revolve around the production of a play called The Cradle Will Rock, a federally funded, pro-union musical that the government thinks was created by Communist insiders.  This theme of government versus art is an argument that continues today, with the National Endowment for the Arts replacing the WPA and witty social commentary traded for dung-covered paintings of the Mother of Christ portrayed with (gasp!) dark skin.  To further contrast the times, the 1930s characters ask each other if they’re “for Franco or the Loyalists,” while today, we ask each other if we’ve “seen that steel-cage match between The Rock and Mankind.”

After a title card explains that the film is mostly a true story, Rock kicks off with an amazing opening shot that goes on for several minutes, tracking the homeless Olive Stanton (Emily Watson, Angela’s Ashes) from her makeshift bed behind a motion picture theater, through a gritty alley, and onto the streets of New York, where the aspiring star offers songs for a nickel.  After waiting in a giant FTP line, Olive manages to land a job as a stagehand from a sympathetic paper-pusher (Joan Cusack, Arlington Road) and quickly finds herself hip-deep in the elitist world of theater folks, before landing the unlikely lead role in the new play directed by the perpetually drunk twenty-one-year-old Orson Welles (Angus MacFadyen, Braveheart) and produced by the perfectly snooty John Houseman (Cary Elwes, Kiss the Girls).

The play, of course, is The Cradle Will Rock, a musical created by Marc Blitzstein (Hank Azaria, Mystery, Alaska), a playwright haunted by a lack of sleep and two ghosts.  The film does a fantastic job showing Blitzstein’s creation of the play, which, to his horror, begins to turn disastrous in the hands of the continually bickering Welles and Houseman.  Also involved in the production is a dirt-poor Italian immigrant (John Turturro, Illuminata) that shuns his pro-Mussolini family so that he can raise his three kids to be Americans.

But the play is just the tip of the iceberg concerning characters and subplots.  There’s a struggling ventriloquist (Bill Murray, Rushmore) that, thanks to the FTP, is forced to instruct two hapless oafs (Jack Black and Kyle Gass from Tenacious D) in the art of ventriloquism.  There’s an Italian Jew (Susan Sarandon, Anywhere But Here) that raises money from rich American industrialites to give to Mussolini.  One of her targets is a steel magnate (Philip Baker Hall, The Insider), who literally sits around and counts his money with William Randolph Hearst (horror director John Carpenter).  There’s a feud between the wealthy Nelson Rockefeller (John Cusack, Being John Malkovich) and Diego Rivera (Rubén Blades, The Devil’s Own), who was paid $21,000 to paint a mural inside the spanking new Rockefeller Center.

And that’s still not all (don’t get me started on Paul Giamatti’s role).  Rock has one of the biggest casts of the year, overshadowed only by Magnolia and Any Given Sunday.  Which brings up an interesting point – Magnolia needed over three hours to tell its multi-layered story, while Sunday nearly hit the 180-minute mark and still seemed to gloss over most of its roles.  Rock packs just as many characters into a film that clocks in at just over two hours.  You almost need a longer film with a cast this size.  Rock doesn’t immediately grab you the way that Magnolia does and, as a result, the beginning is a bit jumbled and the story doesn’t quite gel until well into the film.

Written, directed and produced by Tim Robbins (Dead Man Walking), Rock is brilliantly lensed by Jean-Yves Escoffier (Gummo, Good Will Hunting), and contains some great music from the original play, scored here by David Robbins.  I’m not sure if he’s a relation to Tim, but he worked on Dead Man Walking and Bob Roberts.  In other nepotism news, Tim’s pop appears in the film as a congressman (he previously played a reverend and a bishop in Walking and Roberts), not to mention Sarandon, who nabbed an Oscar the last time she starred in one of her husband’s films.  Sarandon also shares a song with Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder on Rock’s soundtrack.

Rock looks fantastic, thanks to double Oscar-nominee Ruth Myers’ (Emma, The Addams Family) lovely costumes and 1999 Tony Award winner Richard Hoover’s (Twin Peaks) production design.  Stick around for the closing credits, which feature P.J. Harvey performing “Nickel Under Your Foot,” a song from the original production of the play.

2:12 – for nudity and adult language