The Fesser and I settled into our appropriately broke-ass seats at the local theater last night to see Hustle and Flow. The cinetrix says "appropriately" because the opening credits and the overall Memphis milieu give the impression that the movie could have been shot any time in the last 35 years. Clapped-out Caprice Classics and funk-infused yellow title fonts had me scribbling "someone saw [the Beastie Boys' video] Sabotage" in the dark. Pretty much the only element of the, pardon my French, mise-en-scene that places the movie in the here-and-now is the music, crunk spilling out of speakers as basslines thud and echo off boarded-up buildings and cash-cashing joints.
In our tiny, rundown local theater, you can actually see the soundtrack, if you know where to look. Thanks to improper masking, it flickers against the red curtains that gird the screen, running along one side the image plain as day. The cinetrix brings this up because with Hustle and Flow, the moments in which the soundtrack overwhelms the image and the story are the film's strongest, temporarily lifting it out of a welter of expertly deployed cliches.
Writer-director Craig Brewer is slicker than his pimp protagonist DJay, but neither one misses a trick. Thing is, you rarely see Brewer sweat, while DJay glistens in the limpid Memphis heat in every scene. Terrence Howard deserves every last plaudit for his performance as this increasingly articulate man in crisis. I just wish he didn't look quite so much like a former winner on America's Next Top Model. And Taryn Manning adds another affecting notch to the bedpost of her white trash starlet acting career as Nola, but she's beyond typecast at this point.
With Hustle and Flow, you get caught up in the story while it's unfolding, and you want to believe it's sincere, but once it's over you realize how expertly you've been played and how empty you still feel. My advice: Save your singles for the dvd with this one.
