Starring Jamie Foxx, Kerry Washington, and Regina King. Rated PG.

To a particular generation--the Pepsi generation, to be precise--Ray Charles was no more than a celebrity pitchman assuring soda drinkers that they had "got the right one, baby, uh-huh". It might be hard for them to imagine just how radical it was in 1962 for a black artist to merge R & B with country and western. In the civil-rights era, both black and white folks bought Charles's records.

Charles's death last June took him out of this mortal world, but he had already attained the kind of immortality that only a handful of musicians ever achieve. It's just that some folks didn't get the memo.

That's why Ray, the new biopic starring Jamie Foxx and directed with loving care by Taylor Hackford (An Officer and a Gentleman), is so important and so necessary. Hackford, whose previous work includes a documentary about Muhammad Ali (When We Were Kings) and a biopic about the recording industry of the late '50s and early '60s (The Idolmaker), is uniquely qualified to tackle a film of the life of a groundbreaking black musician. This film will go a long way to explaining why Charles was called "the Genius".

You will no doubt hear much from now until Oscar night about how Jamie Foxx eerily embodies his Geniusness. It's all true, and thanks to some prosthetics, Foxx's uncanny mimicry of the musician's verbal and physical mannerisms, and the use of Charles recordings, one could forget that it's Foxx up there and not the man himself.

Although a decidedly upbeat affair, Ray is no hagiography; it sheds light on many unpleasant realities of Charles's life. The film is not quite warts-and-all, and at times it's even exceedingly sentimental. This may be the first feel-good movie ever to feature a likable protagonist who is both a junkie and a shameless womanizer.

We get ample reportage, via surreal flashbacks, of young Charles's life in impoverished rural Florida. Hackford and screenwriter James L. White demonstrate how painful childhood events--such as his brother's death by drowning and his own gradual but inevitable blindness--changed Charles's world, and world-view, forever.

The best parts of Ray, however, are the musical sequences covering Charles's early career. (The film ends around 1979, so we're spared a re-creation of those Pepsi spots.) We follow Ray to Seattle, where he jams with a young Quincy Jones (Larenz Tate), then to New York to cut history-making sides with Atlantic's Ahmet Ertegun (Curtis Armstrong) and Jerry Wexler (Richard Schiff).

Ray is not only a welcome tribute to a departed legend and the great music he left behind, it is also something of a statement of arrival for Jamie Foxx, who displays a genius for acting that almost matches that of the musical genius he portrays.