"Drumline"

Lee's insistence that he's giving the kids an education raises another question that the movie doesn't answer. "Drumline" shows the competition among college marching bands to be as fierce as the competition among their sports teams. The film even ends up at a big national marching-band competition with Devon and his teammates facing their arch-rivals. But we only see Devon studying once, and I began to wonder if he and the other band members who face a grueling practice schedule are exploited the way college athletes are.

Dr. Lee is scrupulous about making his musicians live up to the tough standards he sets for them -- no slacking off and no playing favorites. But when the movie raises the issue of the college administration demanding that the marching band win championships in order to spur alumni donations, and when Lee demands as much from the musicians as he does, it's not untoward to wonder if the college isn't willingly allowing academics to take a back seat.

But there's no way of getting around just how well-made "Drumline" is. I've already said that Stone avoids the clichés you might expect in a youth movie. In the most obvious terms, that means there's no fast editing, and he doesn't allow soundtrack music to substitute for narration or character development. The movie could stand to be about 15 or 20 minutes shorter, but in individual scenes Stone's sense of timing feels just right. The editing, by Bill Pankow and Patricia Bowers, often seems to break off a scene before you expect it to end. What hits you on the rebound is that Stone doesn't extend scenes beyond their narrative or dramatic purpose. He imparts the information we need and moves on.

Stone also has a subtle but strong sense of composition. The cutting in the performance scenes is cued to the rhythm of the players and when the camera is floating up high, as the band practices its moves on the field, you can imagine Busby Berkeley watching somewhere, jealous that he never got his mitts on a marching band. The movie was shot by Shane Hurlbut and none of the shots call attention to themselves. Instead you're struck by the beauty of watching a row of drummers' hands as they blur with the rhythm their sticks are beating out. There are some lovely, misty shots of the band practicing in the early morning, and in the final scenes of the big competition, which takes place at night, in an outdoor stadium, with the darkness providing something like a 3-D effect, the players stand out as lone figures on the field.

Stone has a good, unforced way with actors. I mentioned his refusal to have his actors play black stereotypes. You see that in Orlando Jones' performance as Dr. Lee. Jones, whom you know as the "Make 7-Up Yours" guy, has been used primarily in movies as a lanky-limbed clown. Here he has an authority he has never been given a chance to demonstrate before. And Stone delivers beautifully on the main purpose of the movie: to allow us to experience the precision and beauty and the satisfying oomph of a great marching band. Maybe you have to have seen the great black Southern marching bands to understand how music most of us think of as stiff and martial can have swing. Stone gets that instinctively, and his movie more than does justice to its subject.

For months now, I've been bleating that a good number of the current black movies, even when they aren't successful, give the feel of being made for audiences instead of by committee. Maybe they aren't quite the politicized treatments of black culture and black identity that some viewers (white as well as black) want to see. But they provide black audiences the chance to see movies with involving stories where the black characters aren't sidekicks or multiculti window dressing, and they also suggest how black-made movies can cross the color line (as "Barbershop" did). To put it bluntly, I don't think most audiences give a damn about the color of the characters as long as there are characters -- and as long as a filmmaker has a good story and knows how to tell it.

"Drumline" isn't an important movie or a visionary piece of filmmaking, but I think it's important for moviegoers to pay attention to it. We need the visionary filmmakers and the wunderkinds. But most movies aren't visionary masterpieces, and it's not too much to ask that they be good and intelligently made. Right now, Charles Stone III is a craftsman with brains and taste, an instinctive sense of where to put the camera and the discipline not to belabor scenes. With more original material, he could turn out to be more than that. This is a talented young American filmmaker who bears watching.

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