Eddie Mur­phy struts his stuff in the Dolemite Is My Name trailer

Eddie Mur­phy​‘s career has strafed some rather low val­leys, but he’s nev­er far from anoth­er upswing. Like fel­low Sat­ur­day Night Live alum­nus Adam San­dler, Mur­phy seems like he can turn the old tal­ent on when­ev­er he feels like it, the only issue being that those times are few­er and far­ther apart these days.

A good Eddie Mur­phy per­for­mance is like Halley’s Comet — depend­able if infre­quent, and daz­zling when it does hap­pen. The good news is that he seems to have acti­vat­ed Actu­al­ly Try­ing Mode in the trail­er for his upcom­ing star vehi­cle Dolemite Is My Name, soon to pre­mière at the Toron­to Inter­na­tion­al Film Fes­ti­val before get­ting uploaded to Net­flix​‘s con­tent library.

Mur­phy stars as Rudy Ray Moore, a strug­gling stand-up come­di­an who found unlike­ly suc­cess in his invent­ed char­ac­ter of Dolemite, a quick-talk­ing pimp with a hot tem­per and a well-renowned sex­u­al poten­cy. Though the char­ac­ter was born on open-mic stages, he found a big­ger life than his cre­ator had ever imag­ined on the blax­ploita­tion cin­e­ma cir­cuit, where the 1975 fea­ture Dolemite proved a sur­prise sleep­er hit with audi­ences pick­ing up what Moore was putting down.

The film (direct­ed by Craig Brew­er, his past cred­it on Hus­tle and Flow most rel­e­vant in this par­tic­u­lar gig) chron­i­cles the con­cep­tion and ascent of the Dolemite char­ac­ter, with a strong sup­port­ing cast peo­pling Moore’s col­or­ful world. Kee­gan Michael-Key, Craig Robin­son, Tituss Burgess, Mike Epps, and Wes­ley Snipes make up the mot­ley film crew that brought Dolemite to movie the­aters and made Ray a star.

Save some groan­wor­thy sound­bites in which a tear­ful, grate­ful actress thanks Moore for onscreen rep­re­sen­ta­tion, it looks like an antic restag­ing of an espe­cial­ly eccen­tric chap­ter of film his­to­ry. And if noth­ing else, we’re going to get some tru­ly extrav­a­gant ​’70s hats.