The scripted scenes follow a crooked undercover cop (Ben Stiller) as he frames a college basketball star (the Knicks' Houston, who has a natural, unforced presence) so the kid will be pressured to provide information on a black gangster he's known since childhood. But the cardboard familiarity of these characters and their situation undermines Toback's determination to get at the messiness of contemporary race relations. And Toback gives in to the worst clichis when he presents Houston's grad-student girlfriend (Schiffer) as that most vicious of stereotypes, the white ice-goddess bitch who lures black men to their doom.

The structural mess of "Black and White" is all the more disappointing given Toback's blunt, chancy take on hip-hop. In this movie, the gangstas really are gangsters. The Wu-Tang Clan's Power plays Rich, a hip-hop impresario whose real capital comes from being a crime lord, and his would-be star, Cigar (Wu-Tang's Raekwon), is also his chief henchman. They treat the music business as just another racket they can muscle their way into. When the owner of a recording studio (Toback, in a funny cameo) explains to them that he's too booked to give them studio time, Power says to him, "This is why people get hurt," and he leaves no doubt that it's a threat. Rich and Cigar are thugs with a large racial chip on their shoulder; their antennae are always out for what they perceive as disrespect, and they justify their threats and brutishness by rationalizing that the whites they squeeze are probably racists anyway.

Toback doesn't buy into the liberal apologia of hip-hop as the authentic voice of the streets (the same argument that was used in the '70s to justify the worst excesses of blaxploitation films). He doesn't pile on any hearts-and-flowers excuses for Rich and Cigar's thuggishness. And Houston's character, who grew up in the same neighborhood Rich did and who has taken a very different path, clearly implies that the thug life is not the only one open to young black men. The thing that makes it tough for me to criticize hip-hop is that the people who are most vocally opposed to it use the same arguments that have always been used against rock 'n' roll; they're almost obscenely eager to reduce those who play rock or listen to it as vulgar cretins. That view figures prominently in Stanley Crouch's rave for the film in the current Talk magazine. He's a smart, gutsy critic -- and his argument for the film is persuasively reasoned -- but I've never been able to stomach his fuddy-duddy contempt for rock music.

But it's not endorsing censorship to say that there is something appalling and puny about the guns, money and ho's braggadocio of much hip-hop. When Bruce Springsteen sings in the first person as Charley Starkweather (or to use a less articulate example, when Mick Jagger sings as the Boston Strangler), I can still hear an artist's distance and control articulating a murderous state of mind. There's an even more ironic distance in the pulp-horror scenarios of "Momma's Gonna Die Tonight" or "Cop Killer," both of which Ice-T performed with his thrash-metal band Body Count.

But for the most part I hear no distance in too many of hip-hop's fantasies of violence and macho sex. There seems to be something approaching racism in the insistence that those fantasies are an authentic expression of black experience (it would be like arguing that Clint Eastwood movies are the truest expressions of being a white male in America), and in the reduction of the human striving that cuts across all races to the most naked materialism. In the current issue of Cineaste, in a perceptive piece on the rise of black middle-class romantic comedies, Mia L. Mask quotes actor Taye Diggs as saying, "It's important for people to know that African-Americans do more than shoot each other in the head." But I don't feel that many hip-hop performers even consider that a priority. Hip-hop has of course provided exceptions -- artists like Fugees, De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, Timbaland; the poignant use of the refrain from "Annie" in Jay-Z's "Hard Knock Life"; the undeniable and terrifying toting up of the cost of gangsta life in the Geto Boys' "Mind Playing Tricks on Me" (for my money, the greatest rap song ever); or even the sinuous celebration of sex on Q-Tip's solo debut, "Amplified." But for me these songs and artists remain exceptions.

That's why the most authentic thing about "Black and White" -- the presence of Raekwon and Power -- is also the most troubling. Neither of them is an actor, and neither has the instinctive charisma that has often made musicians and singers from Dean Martin to Ice Cube so effective in the movies. Power, especially, has just about the deadest eyes I've ever seen on screen. He's not a performer projecting deadness, the way that Ice Cube does in the final scenes of "Boyz N the Hood." There seems to be no separation between Power and the character he's playing. I'm not saying that he's a thug in real life, but that he evidences no inclination to question or evaluate the actions of his role. Toback miscalculates badly when he includes a shot of Power sitting alone brooding after he orders a friend's murder. He doesn't appear capable of the sort of remorse you see in Harvey Keitel after he betrays Robert De Niro in "Mean Streets." He's a hard blank slate.

But Toback's method of presenting the evidence without judgment backfires, finally appearing just as shapeless as the movie's structure. I wonder how much better a movie he could have made if instead of wanting to be Johnny on the spot with this examination of hip-hop, he'd delved into race relations via the new urban soul of artists like D'Angelo, Macy Gray and Angie Stone, all of whom have links to the '50s rock 'n' roll he still loves. Toback wants to be au courant, but as sharp and daring as he is on hip-hop, he doesn't connect with it in the way he immediately connects whenever he includes some of his beloved rock 'n' roll on the soundtrack. Listening to Rosie and the Originals singing "Angel Baby," you sense this movie's unspoken question: How did black music get so mean?

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