Review: Hustle and Flow (repost)

In his to-be-legendary pan of Revenge of the Sith, Anthony Lane accused George Lucas of pursuing “a terrible puritan dream”. By Sith, the zenith of the six-film series, Lucas has perfected his vision of a world devoid of corporeal realities and sensory compulsions: the various protagonists that populate Sith’s various planets don’t just don’t have appetites for sex, drugs, rock and roll, profanity or virtually anything else that makes an average human life a little bit more worth living. And, with the exception of Mr. And Mrs. Smith, a film that’s so indulgent in its “ironic” hedonism that it’s worth wondering at points whether or not it's even joking, most of the summer’s few hits traffic in comparable denial of guttural desires. So read the New York Times’ rating advisory on one of the top five films to be released thus far this year: "War of the Worlds is rated PG-13. Much of the earth's population is wiped out, leaving very little time for sex or bad language."

And so MTV and Paramount Classics have been pushing Craig Brewer’s Hustle and Flow as a feel-good, follow-your-dream, Horatio Alger story – essentially, Rocky in the key of crunk. And whilst recent history might suggest to their marketing people that this is the most prudent move, I’m not sure it’s all that necessary. I get the feeling that if Hustle and Flow is going to be a powerful cultural phenomena over the next few months (and I’m betting that it will be), it’s essentially going to be a case of a film that revels in the spirit of balls-out intemperance enacting an overdue revenge.

 
The film even seems to understand how outsize its kind of romantic gluttony appears in the current climate. Witness what could be called the film's thesis statement, spoken by DJ Qualls about half-way through: "It's about pain, and pussy." Qualls then notices he's in mixed company. "Oh," he says, turning to the prostitute sitting beside him. "Sorry, baby." Hustle and Flow is full of sort-of jokes like this: at various points, almost every character gets caught expressing some kind of supersized desire, and then has to take just a step or two back in place.

It opens on an extreme close-up of DJay (a fairly amazing Terrence Howard), a pimp working the streets of Memphis in a old car with a punch-button stereo. In a longish monologue, punctuated aurally by sniffles and visually by smoke, Djay mumbles his way through a stoner-philosophic pep talk, something about dogs and men and mankind. His not-exactly attentive audience is Nola (Taryn Manning), his barely-legal but already-jaded, blonde-cornrowed best girl. Cars pull up alongside DJay’s patchy old Chevy, and Nola splays her skin-and-bones moneymaker in a perpendicular line over her owner to pop her head in the potential client’s window. It’s as much to get a taste of the wannabe john’s air conditioning as it is to give him a taste of the goods.

DJay doesn’t have air conditioning in his car - and his girls won’t let him forget it. It’s the portable office out of which he hustles $40 hoes and $20 bags of speed and weed, and chauffuers his other bitches. They include the too-pregnant-to-work mother hen Shug (Taraji P. Henson), and nightmare diva Lexus (Paula Jai Parker), who has graduated out of the rolling brothel to the strip club stage. Lexus dances (and turns tricks) at what must be one of the nastiest strip clubs ever depicted on a movie screen. Girls bounce their cellulite-rich asses inches away from white plastic industrial buckets set up to collect brown water dripping from the leaky ceiling. The club scenes are so gritty you can smell them, and it’s not pretty.

Still, it apparently beats drive-through hooking as far as it goes, and Lexus demands queen bee treatment for working her way up the totem pole to the stripper pole. She’s almost been drawn in some kind of echo of an old-timey professional goldigger, but unlike a pre-code gal slutting her way to the boardroom (ala Barbara Stanwyck in Baby Face), it’s hard to make an impact when you’re just one of three hoes. Thoroughly unslaked, she tortures DJay and the other girls in measures of shrill entitlement. DJay’s justified frustration over all of that leads to film’s one true moment of misogynistic violence (this, after all, is a film where a man says, "I ain't trying to call no ho a bitch," and we're meant to read it as a feminist-sympathetic statement). It’s a flash of darkness right at the center of the picture that, whilst probably ultimately realistic, comes off as truly shocking – and it seemed to surprise everyone on screen as much as it did me. We're not suppossed to read DJay as a bad guy, even when he does bad things - another example of the film's productively askew moral schema.

But Lex’s taunting only serves to amplify a powerful inner conflict already going on within DJay. a conflict given shape by three all-too serendipitous events. First he learns, serendipitously, that Skinny Black (Ludacris), a high school acquaintence who has made it big in the rap game, is coming back to Memphis for a July 4th party. Even more serendipitously, in the span of the next day, a junkie offers DJay a baby Casio in a greasy brown paper bag in exchange for a bag of dope. Even more serendipitously, DJay runs into another old aquaintence whilst on a routine drug deal. Key (Anthony Anderson, who is excellent even when underused as comic relief) is a heavily-whipped family man, as well as a small time audio producer. Key drags Nola and Djay to hear the gospel choir he works with, and this is where it all comes together for Djay: both pimp and ho are visibly affected, their constant crank sniffles momentarily replaced by the sniffle of tears.

It's at this point, with the rag-tag bunch of musically-proficient, dream-indulgent nerds collected, and the goal (getting a tape in the hands of Skinny Black) in sight, that Hustle and Flow devolves into the narrative enervations of run-of-the-mill Garage Band 101. From rote frustrations to gratuitous breakdowns to dumb little epiphanies, it's just illustrating a kind of "music-making magic" that we've all seen before. Brewer is terrifically unsubtle about the way he solicits emotion in these scenes (The pregnant hooker can sing? Then she can help pay the rent after all!) - but that doesn't mean that occasional moments aren't genuinely touching and/or exhilarating. It's too bad, then, that the last 15 minutes of the film, from the shoot-em-up denouement to the "redemptive" finale, are completely extraneous, and even borderline unwatchable.  Hustle and Flow earns a lot of goodwill in its first 100 minutes, which only serves to make its final, yawn-inducing moments more frustrating.

Hustle and Flow packages itself as blaxsploitation from its title card on, which may trouble anyone already itchy over the idea of watching a movie about black people’s problems conceived by a white filmmaker. As it turns out, there’s little cause for concern: Hustle is obstinately multi-culti, in a manner in which youth culture films have historically failed to be. If its good intentions are sometimes broad-brush thickheaded, there's no denying that it's consistently, satisfyingly entertaining. It's a middlebrow, feel-good class-clash dramedy that shoots just over the LCD, and summarily scores. Do the kids deserve better? Probably, but they're unlikely to get it from any film that they'll actually want to go to this season.