The guitarist-songwriter for Sonia Dada, Dan Pritzker, son of Hyatt Hotels tycoon Jay Pritzker, put his art and his money where his heart is when he made "Louis." This engaging hybrid — a mythological silent-movie version of Louis Armstrong's early life — premieres Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Music Center at Strathmore. Wynton Marsalis will accompany it with a 10-piece jazz ensemble (playing music mostly composed by Marsalis), and pianist Cecile Licad will play the sprightly, sensuous L.M. Gottschalk pieces central to the film's New Orleans flavor.

Pritzker's music for Sonia Dada, an R&B group infused with rock and peppered with gospel, often evoked the headline-writer's pun, "My heart belongs to Dada." But his "Louis" film has genuine Dada-esque qualities that lift it from the realm of mere curiosity to all-out fascination. Pritzker employs Keystone Kops mugging, Broadway-meets- Lincoln Center dancing, antique techniques like "iris" shots (which circle in like an iris on a detail of an image) and a 21st- century mobile camera to tell a story of bordellos and political backrooms, dead-end-kid life, and the explosion of jazz in the Big Easy streets. It's a speedy, voluptuous melange.

Pritzker started this film after he had already embarked on developing a traditional biographical picture — a talkie — about the cornetist Buddy Bolden, the legendary father of jazz. While wrestling with the challenge of writing dialogue, he took his mother to a screening of Charlie Chaplin's "City Lights." On the phone from New York last week, he said, "It was so great to see that silent film with the Chicago Symphony playing its score. I started to seek out other silent films screened with live ensembles. It was a fantastic kind of entertainment that I had never experienced before. I started thinking, what if I do it with jazz?" He ended up directing his talkie and his silent simultaneously. (He's still finishing "Bolden.")

His idea was always to craft an operatic fable, not a historical diorama, from Armstrong's childhood. In "Louis," 6-year-old Armstrong (Anthony Coleman) lives with a baby sister and a single mother who prostitutes herself to pay the bills. He works for the Karnofskys, a couple of kindly junk haulers, while serving as knight gallant to Grace (Shanti Lowry), a Storyville bordello's prime attraction. (Grace and the other Storyville beauties serve as his muses.) The plot hinges on wicked Judge Perry ( Jackie Earle Haley), who takes desperate measures to hide his fatherhood of Grace's infant daughter. Ironically, it's Haley who gives the most Chaplin-esque performance, equal parts Adenoid Hynkel in "The Great Dictator" and the Little Tramp.

The combination of Chaplin and jazz — and silent moviemaking — resonated with Pritzker's great cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond ("McCabe & Mrs. Miller," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind"). On the phone from Los Angeles last week, he said, "I believe that the art of the silent movie was far superior to anything that came in after sound and color; it's astonishing to think of what silent filmmakers would have done if they had the opportunity to keep developing their art."

Zsigmond, with his friend and colleague, Laszlo Kovacs, fled Hungary after the Soviet invasion in 1956. Their smuggled-out footage of the street fighting is central to the historical record of Soviet conquest. "When I went to film school in Hungary in 1951-1955," Zsigmond recalled, "we could not see current American films, because they were not in agreement with the powers-that-be politically. But we did get to see Chaplin, Buster Keaton and silent films. And there was an undercurrent of politics, especially in Chaplin's films. He was always about the little man against the system."

Zsigmond thought it was incredible that they showed "The Great Dictator": "They didn't think it through, because politically for them it was going to be very dangerous — it ends with Chaplin giving an amazing speech about freedom." Chaplin speaks out against oppression of every kind; he opposes all dictatorships, Communist or fascist. Zsigmond remembered, "We had visions of police rushing into the projection booth. We were expecting them to shut it down."

As for jazz, "Whenever younger people would go out, they would go to a club playing jazz or music like jazz to groups of 40 or 50 people. It was like the wish for freedom. We thought, 'At least we can do this, if we don't tell anyone.' Jazz was an underground thing."

Zsigmond shot "Louis" on color film, desaturated it to black and white (or sepia and white), then let some stressed reds and cornet-brassy golds seep through. "The color is not a modern idea," Zsigmond said. "In the old days, they often colorized or tinted certain things." He also slightly "undercranked" the film, to give the action a flickering motion. Because of Pritzker's daring and Zsigmond's ever-fresh 80-year-old eyes, "Louis" is a visual spellbinder.

michael.Sragow@baltsun.com

If you go

Dan Pritzker's 'Louis,' with live music by Wynton Marsalis and Cecile Licad, plays Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Music Center at Strathmore. Call 301-581-5100 or go to strathmore.org.