Etta James "At Last" performed by Beyonce in Cadillac Records Video

Fans of musical dramas may experience some deja vu while watching "Cadillac Records"; the story is remarkably similar to one told in the middle of 2006's "Dreamgirls," in a montage set to "Steppin' to the Bad Side." There's the plucky upstart studio where African-American musicians are pioneering new kinds of music. There's the driven record-label owner who's dispensing payola to deejays, trying to buy his way past institutionalized racism and cross over from the R&B ghetto to the white-dominated pop charts. There's the white group that steals a black musician's song and turns it into a hit single. There are lots of flashy new cars as symbols of success. And above all, there's the music, the motivator and the moneymaker, the one thing that heals all wounds—or at least in the case of the blues, expresses them. In "Dreamgirls," the sequence is a flashy, fictionalized amalgam of events from the Motown era. In "Cadillac Records," it's straight-up history. The film may also induce deja vu in longtime Chicago residents, because there's a chance they lived through these stories, when South Side brothers Leonard and Phil Chess relaunched Aristocrat as Chess Records and started releasing albums by the likes of Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Bo Diddley, Buddy Guy, John Lee Hooker, Sonny Boy Williamson, Howlin' Wolf, Chuck Berry and many more. "Cadillac Records" shrugs off Phil Chess and the label's early years in order to focus on Leonard, on some of the label's biggest personalities ...