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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
The summer's steamiest film brings us a hip-hop dreaming hustler we just can't keep our eyes -- or ears -- off of.
Jul 22, 2005 | Writer-director Craig Brewer's remarkable "Hustle & Flow" is a movie with heat, and not just the figurative kind. This rags-to-possible-riches story -- its ending is both satisfying and ambiguous -- about a hustler who chases down his dream of becoming a hip-hop star, takes place in Memphis, Tenn., a Memphis of summer dresses clinging to sticky skin, and of cars that seem to move far slower than usual, like tired animals conserving their energy in the midst of a heat wave. In this Memphis, convenience stores are desert oases of mythical proportion: A popsicle will cost you, but the air conditioning is free, and no matter how little money you've got, that momentary blast of coolness can make you feel like royalty.
"Hustle & Flow" suspends you in its spell of mood, of feeling, of climate. It's a pop picture that finds its richness in peeling down to the essentials of good storytelling. In a world of movies that try far too hard to move, entertain and dazzle us, the artistry of "Hustle & Flow" lies in the way it waits for us to come to it. We can walk as slowly as we want, but sooner or later, it's going to get us.
"Hustle & Flow"
Directed by Craig Brewer
Starring Terrence Howard, Taraji P. Henson, Taryn Manning
Terrence Howard (who gave a subtly layered performance in Paul Haggis' droningly didactic "Crash") plays DJay, a small-time drug dealer and pimp who presides over a household of women that includes tough-cookie prostitute Nola (Taryn Manning) and sweet-natured Shug (the marvelous Taraji P. Henson), who's taking a break from working because she's heavily pregnant. DJay makes money any way he can: As a character, he's attuned to his own survival, not our approval, and while we're immediately intrigued by him, we don't automatically like him. At one point early in the movie he throws one of his hookers (played by Paula Jai Parker) out of the house because she has become a squalling nuisance. But he also throws out the woman's infant son, to whom Shug has become deeply attached, along with her: He picks up the baby in his little walker and plops him on the doorstep with his weeping, cussing mother. It's a moment that tears you in two -- even the tough-as-nails Nola runs away from the scene, unable to bear it -- and while the sequence throws the movie momentarily off-balance, it serves an important purpose: DJay isn't the kind of protagonist we can cuddle up to.
As much as we want to believe he's a good guy at heart, Brewer isn't going to make things cushy for us by rushing our sympathy for him. The movie demands that we accept DJay on purely human terms -- in other words, that we acknowledge the ugliness of his flaws before we're allowed a glimpse of his latent decency. In a later scene, he pimps out Nola against her will in a way that strips her of her dignity, and she turns on him with a jagged directness that's heart-rending. (Manning, with her hard-looking eyeliner and coolly appraising stare, resembles the original 1959 Barbie, but unlike Barbie, her Nola has soul.) DJay may be a charming underdog, but he's also a growly, unpredictable one; as charismatic and achingly, painfully human as he is, he never fully earns our trust.
But our conflicted feelings about DJay -- drawn out by Howard's supple, jaguar-cool performance -- are a reflection of this deceptively straightforward movie's complexity and power. And even when we're not sure we like DJay that much, we always believe in him: "Hustle & Flow" is an old-fashioned story of redemption, and it delivers on every promise of uplift and euphoria the genre demands. DJay gets ahold of an ancient, plinky Casio and decides that if an old semiacquaintance of his by the name of Skinny Black (played with shimmery slyness by Ludacris) can become a rap star, so can he. By chance, he reconnects with an old pal, Key (Anthony Anderson), a sound engineer who makes a meager living committing gospel choir recordings (as well as court depositions) to tape. And along with Shelby (DJ Qualls), a square-looking church musician whose hipness far transcends his scrawny whiteness, they sit down in DJay's modest, jerry-built home studio to make a hit.
