Feel free to call it anything you want. I’m calling it disgraceful. I think I understand the relative lack of promotional pizzazz and advertising money behind Darnell Martin’s superb “Cadillac Records,” but that doesn’t make it right for one second.

Here is not only a new film written and directed by the first black woman ever to direct a major studio film (“I Like It Like That” in 1994) but one about a truly great story that cried out for a major film.

And yet compared with the kind of money and promotion you can routinely find behind transient multiplex garbage, “Cadillac Records” has been virtually forced to sneak into a lot of cities unscreened and relatively unheralded.

Cadillac Records

Three and a half stars, out of four

Beyonce Knowles, Jeffrey Wright, Adrien Brody, Cedric the Entertainer, Mos Def, Eamonn Walker and Gabrielle Union in Darnell Martin’s tale of the blues and rock luminaries who crowded around the rise of Chicago’s Chess Records. 108 minutes.

Rated R for language and suggestiveness. Now playing in area theaters.

It’s about one of the great subjects in American music —the rise and fall of Chicago’s Chess Records, with its astonishing blues and rock roster of Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Howlin’ Wolf, Etta James, Chuck Berry and Willie Dixon, among others. The name of the movie refers to Leonard Chess’ penchant for buying (some would say buying off) his roster new Cadillacs.

Jamie Foxx’s amazing performance notwithstanding, the Ray Charles biopic “Ray” wasn’t nearly as good a film as “Cadillac Records.” Nor was “Walk the Line,” about Johnny Cash. And as long as I’m in the neighborhood, Diana Ross as Billie Holiday in “Lady Sings the Blues” wasn’t half as convincing as Beyonce Knowles as James, despite the pitilessly obvious fact that neither the body nor the voice of the altogether stunning Beyonce are the size of those belonging to James.

When you see the film, you can understand why Hollywood studio suits and hypemeisters might be a wee bit gun-shy about pouring advertising and promotional budgets into the film. In its tragicomic portrait of the great blues harmonica player “Little Walter” Jacobs, there’s a lot of promiscuous bulletry, including one scene of Little Walter “busting a cap” into an imitator that is played — with weird effectiveness — for laughs.

And the movie is rather scrupulous about pointing to white exploitation of black musical performers in its era. These are not exactly things that are conducive to Hollywood bigshots opening the promotional coffers for a film.

It’s still disgraceful, I think, that it has been cast out into the world so unceremoniously — especially after what happened to the world Nov. 4. The story of the movie is too good and so are the performances. And the movie is too much fun.

All the principals are well portrayed with impressive juice by performers clearly relishing the chance. The movie doesn’t even suggest what Chess Records did in its jazz recording arm, Argo Records (Ahmad Jamal, Ramsey Lewis, Gene Ammons, Oliver Nelson).

Granted, there’s about 50 pounds of mythology and pure fantasy for every ounce of fact in “Cadillac Records” but it feels truer in all of its inaccuracy, anachronism and pure invention than either the self-important “Ray” or the equally pretentious “Walk the Line” ever did.

No, no one in the ’50s made a big point of drinking Glenfiddich scotch, despite what this movie would have you believe on the fly. And no, Little Walter Jacobs didn’t die in Muddy Waters’ vestibule (reputedly he died in his sleep in the home of a girlfriend). And, if we can believe star Adrien Brody’s tale, James freely denies sharing a clearly pre-coital kiss with Leonard Chess. (I believe her, if that’s her story, despite her legendary capacity for trouble-making.)

Nowhere in this movie is there even a mention of Chess’ all-important brother Phil. Darnell Martin tells her version of Chess’ tale — one of the richest in the history of vernacular music in America — with about as much poetic license as possible.

And if you think I’m complaining, forget it. If you want a scrupulously factual history of Chess records, read a book or go into the more respectable sources online. This is the movie to see if you want to see an electrifying performance by Jeffrey Wright as Muddy Waters. It’s true his mumbling glosses over a good tenth of his dialogue, but you won’t mind.

It’s also the one to see if you want to know how moving Beyonce can be as Etta James despite her physical and vocal unsuitability; and to see Mos’ Def as Chuck Berry and Eamonn Walker as Waters’ fearsome, even hair-raising rival Howlin’ Wolf.

Cedric the Entertainer narrates the whole thing, playing the great Willie Dixon, the composer of some of the greatest blues songs of that or any era (“The Seventh Son,” “Hoochie Coochie Man,” “Spoonful”) and you’ll have no difficulty believing the importance of his bonhomie to what Chess was doing.

When the great blues critic Pete Welding once said Waters’ first electric blues in Chicago were “loud, mean and magnificent,” this movie gives you a palpable sense of that, despite the fact that all the music in the film was re-created. (By all means, skip the soundtrack, though, and buy the originals.)

There a real sense of musical road life in a segregated era, not to mention music biz corruption.

Crucially, this movie has the one thing that no movie about its subject should be lacking for as long as a second — energy. It may not have as much as “Dreamgirls” perhaps but, to mention a truly great rock “B” movie of yore, it’s right up there with the horrifically underrated “American Hot Wax.”

Sure, the movie flies from narrative point A to point B at top speed, but anyone who lived through its era can tell you that’s exactly right to get a feel for the tempo of how things seemed to unfold with this music that changed America forever.

And the movie’s advent in your neighborhood multiplex has been underlined just about as much as Chess Records itself was when it was on the rise.

Fitting, perhaps.

But still, I think, disgraceful.