Renaissance man

>> R&B singer Usher Raymond holds it down with a lead role in Light It Up

by SCOTT C

After two Grammy nominations, a couple crazy stretches on the Billboard Top 100 and a gazillion records sold worldwide, Usher Raymond has decided to expand his army of screaming teenage girls. Perhaps bored by his teen idol status and the life of an R&B singer, he has made the delicate move to the wonderful world of movies. Light It Up, directed by Craig Bolotin (That Night), brings yet another side of the 20-year-old Usher to light.

"I'm just a multi-talented individual," explained the heartthrob when I contacted him at the tail-end of a gruelling 20-interview stretch. "All I need is an audience and I'll always come up with creative ways to entertain them."

Usher plays the lead role of Lester Dewitt, a star basketball player who becomes the unlikely leader of a bunch of students who take over their high school. A protest over a fired teacher quickly escalates into a hostage situation where the "mismatched" students have to work together in order to survive.

Now, despite the Walt Disney believe-in-yourself-and-anything-is-possible feel of this movie, and the completely tired "mismatched" kids in a crisis thing, Usher comes off all right. I'm not saying this is his ticket into the Academy or anything, he's just a much better actor than I'd originally expected. I went in thinking he would play a character who would end up singing at least a few lines in the movie, but that is not the case. He doesn't even have a song on the soundtrack! When we spoke, Usher tried to fool me into thinking that maybe he did sing in the film, but when I told him I'd already seen it, he quickly fessed up.

One thing I enjoyed in this movie was Forest Whitaker, playing another strangely intense role as a wounded cop taken hostage by those damn kids. Performances by Judd Nelson and Vanessa Williams were immediately forgotten, while the casting of Rosario Dawson (Kids) and Sara Gilbert (Roseanne) made the group dynamic digestible.

The truth, though, is that any box-office triumphs enjoyed by Light It Up can probably be traced to a multitude of pre-pubescent girls who had to see their little man Usher on the big screen.

Light It Up opens Friday, November 12