"Brown Sugar"

What you won't find in "Brown Sugar" or the much better "Barbershop" or last year's "Love and Basketball" is the self-consciousness crippling most Hollywood movies. Black movies don't command the elephantine budgets of white commercial movies and while racism certainly plays a part in that, the modest budgets are turning out to be to the advantage of the filmmakers. Because they don't have to worry about recouping inflated budgets, they're free to relax without fretting about making every moment a whopper. And so the new black movies feel as if they have been made for the purpose of actually entertaining an audience instead of just hyping them to death while picking their pockets.

When groups of people who have been underrepresented in movies finally get to make their own, it's perhaps inevitable that many of them will turn to familiar conventions and formulas. But the presence of people who have traditionally been marginalized creates a new context that can blow away the staleness we might feel if we were watching these stories with white actors. Let me put it this way: Nobody really feels like they're missing anything if they don't see "Sweet Home Alabama" or the latest piece of pap from Nora Ephron. But there haven't been so many black romantic comedies that black audiences -- or the people making these movies -- are taking them for granted.

The failings of "Brown Sugar" don't feel like they happened because the people making it were too jaded to give a damn. The level of Hollywood commercial moviemaking is so bad right now that it often feels as if we aren't even being given that crumb of respect by the filmmakers and studio chiefs. The new black movies make those of us sitting in the theater watching feel as if we actually count for something.

That good feeling can carry you through this movie's silly and dull patches. "Brown Sugar" avoids one of the mistakes romantic movies are making right now by refusing to portray the lovers Sidney and Dre leave behind as evil or stupid (though it comes dangerously close with Nicole Ari Parker's character). The movie's funniest moments belong to Wendell Pierce and Erik Weiner as an idiot duo of salt-and-pepper hip-hoppers who make the charts with their version of the old Paul McCartney-Michael Jackson stinker "The Girl Is Mine" (their version is called "The Ho Is Mine").

They're given a run for their money by Mos Def. As an aspiring MC signed by Dre, Def has the laid-back delivery of a big stoned alley cat. He doesn't push a thing yet his timing is sometimes close to flabbergasting. Whoppers just roll off his tongue. He has a riff on what really happens at the end of "Casablanca" that may have Jesse Jackson rushing to defend the manhood of Claude Rains, though anyone with a sense of humor will probably laugh. The mistake the movie makes with Mos Def is not giving him more scenes with Queen Latifah as Sidney's girlfriend, and the woman he has a crush on; their few moments together are wonderful.

Taye Diggs never overdoes Dre's intensity or integrity; he's an understated leading man who is all the more likable because of it. But it's Sanaa Lathan as Sidney who won my heart here. There's a freshness, an unspoiled quality, to Lathan that seems to connect effortlessly with the audience, the way it did in "Love and Basketball," though she's grown as an actress since then. The voice-overs the movie gives Lathan allow her to use her delicious buttery voice, and the slow drip of her words does more than anything else here to convey the torch these characters carry for hip-hop.

The best moment in "Brown Sugar" is one that's either a bittersweet stroke of inspiration or an example of the filmmaker's inattention to detail. Lathan narrates the closing lines of Sidney's book, lines that talk about how despite what people said, she never thought of hip-hop as a fad; it has been a constant in her life and has grown with her. But as we hear those lines we also hear, on the soundtrack, the jazz singer Cassandra Wilson's wonderful version of Cyndi Lauper's ballad "Time After Time."

Lathan's words suddenly sound less like a tribute to a still strong friend than they do a tender kiss goodbye, an acknowledgment that some times in our life are beyond recapturing, that not all the music and things we once loved grow with us, and that sometimes we have to look for what speaks to us in other places, even in "grown-up" music, the sort that, when we were kids, we could never have imagined liking.

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