MOVIE · 1984

The Cotton Club

CrimeDramaMusical130 min

Inside Harlem’s Cotton Club, jazz, romance, and gang warfare collide as performers, patrons, and mob figures all move through the same famous nightclub. Richard Gere is among the people pulled into that orbit, while Gregory Hines brings the stage world into sharper focus as the club’s entertainment runs alongside rising violence outside it. Francis Ford Coppola places the story in 1930s New York, where music and spectacle share space with Prohibition-era crime, and the club’s allure is bound up with the racial lines that shape who performs there and who gets to sit in the audience.