Posted: 07/25/2005

Hustle & Flow

(2005)

by Ben Beard

It ain’t easy bein’ cheesy.

Terrence Howard is D-Jay, a fast-talking, low-rent pimp living in a poverty-stricken neighborhood outside of Memphis, Tennessee. Driving a piece of shit hoopty with silver rims, D-Jay barely survives with a stable of three girls, one pregnant, another a mother, their ersatz family on the cusp of disintegration as his hoes are on the verge of open revolt. D-Jay earns extra cash by hustling dirt marijuana to a Memphis bar owner (played by Isaac Hayes) and other locals. D-Jay, in other words, is small time. If he has any dreams of a better life, he has long since forgotten them. Hayes tells D-Jay that the small-town hood made good, rap star Skinny Black, has reserved his bar for the fourth of July, and requests the best marijuana D-Jay can get his hands on.

Memphis emerges as a sweaty, stinking, abandoned place. Busted out neighborhoods, decaying urban and suburban sprawl, black-tar sidewalks and cracked neon highlight the sunken city on the river. Memphis’s good points—Beale Street, its food, its downtown—are overlooked. For D-Jay, it’s a sad, lonely place. For a pimp, as Iceberg Slim intimated, is the loneliest, meanest son of a bitch on earth. D-Jay haunts its dark corners, abandoned warehouses, dark alleys, rundown gas stations, barely staying ahead of the bills and rent.

But everything changes when an old wino exchanges with D-Jay a keyboard for a quarter bag of weed. At home, in a rotting, dilapidated duplex apartment, D-Jay escapes the chaos of his house to goof around on the keyboard. And here he finds a rhythm in his head that he lost a long time ago. A few days later, serendipitously, D-Jay runs into an old friend, Clyde (played by Anthony Anderson). Clyde works as a soundman for church recordings and court transcriptions, but like D-Jay, wants a different, better life.

Clyde, it seems, is living a respectable, middle class existence. But he yearns to have his own record label, a wish his wife Lexus (played with comic verve by Paula Jai Parker) does not support or understand. Just as D-Jay is trapped in his seedy world of tricks and hoes and hustlers, so is Clyde imprisoned by the trappings of bourgeois sensibilities.

One evening, D-Jay convinces Clyde to produce an album.

The movie falls into a predictable path from this point on. A team of loveable outcasts and losers all find ways to contribute to D-Jay’s rhymes. D-Jay’s raps about pimping, about hustling, about trying to survive, the things he knows. His audience responds to his music with awe, as if he were a rapper supreme, blown away by what they are hearing.

Of course, in the real world, rappers like D-Jay are a dime a dozen. Rapping about pimping, getting paid, hustling, thugging, fighting and even killing are old hat in our post-gangster rap world where Jay Z retires at 35 to buy partial ownerships of the New York Knicks and Eminem plays himself in Curtis Hansen’s “Eight Mile.” The movie’s soundtrack features some thumping music, sure, but the viewer has to wonder, what’s so special about D-Jay’s skills?

A plan emerges as Clyde and D-Jay and a skinny white boy named Shelby began to record demos. D-Jay will meet Skinny Black at the bar in Memphis and slip him one of the tapes. Black will listen to the tape, be wowed by D-Jay’s skills, and arrange for a recording contract.

And if this all sounds interesting and compelling, well, it sort of is and sort of isn’t. An impatient camera and lack of a tangible style damages the visual look of the movie, and the on-location shoot is mostly wasted, as Memphis as a city isn’t really explored. In many ways it is a rambling, sloppy mess. A few strong set pieces, mostly revolving around the recording of D-Jay’s songs, are intermixed with slightly cheesy and highly contrived moments (such as when D-Jay cries while hearing a choir sing in church), and loose, chatty scenes.

The movie tries to humanize a vicious street thug and for that should get some credit. But what starts out as a Cool Hand Luke character study very quickly devolves into Rocky II-style rags to riches story. The details of the daily life of a pimp are mostly glossed over, which is a shame. By their nature, pimps are a cruel breed, but also intriguing figures in the American consciousness. Their very existence serves as a condemnation of America, capitalism, humanity. And their street-level profit-driven motives offer a great metaphor for the bankers, CEOs, and politicians who trick out public coffers for their own gain.

In fact, in the highly politicized seventies, pimps, gigolos, and hustlers were commonplace in American cinema, traveling across a morally ambiguous terrain. Hustle & Flow tries to traverse similar territory, down to the gritty camerawork that starts the film, but in the end comes across as strangely misogynistic and almost gleeful in its rap pimp mythology.

D-Jay isn’t romanticized, but neither is he fully explored. Because the question remains: why is he a pimp? How did he get in to it in the first place? Iceberg Slim answers this question in his fictionalized autobiography, Pimp. Pimps, he says, hate women. And thus choose a career where they can cause the most physical and emotional damage, while profiting from others’ debasement. D-Jay, however, comes across more as a confused adolescent than a hate-filled man. The viewer is supposed to root for D-jay, despite his shortcomings. But the movie doesn’t earn the audience’s support. D-Jay’s desperation to be heard chairs his quest for rap fame within the confines of an artist searching for his voice. But wouldn’t a crass money grab be just as compelling? Couldn’t we still root for a poor man trying to become rich because he can no longer stand being poor? Why do hustlers, hucksters, and thieves in movie world always have pure, high-minded motives?

As for the much-lauded acting, Terrence Howard and Anthony Anderson, along with the rest of the cast, do a very fine job. Howard seems to be channeling Benicio Del Toro, with his mumbling vulgarisms and his verbal tics. With his harsh glare and angry sneer, Howard centers the film in a slow burning rage. The women in the film deliver strong, textured performances, too. It is the script that isn’t up to the task, which is surprising, considering how good the script is at its best moments.

Some reviewers have called this an edgy film, but at its heart lay middle of the road conservative values. Everyone needs a dream. Anyone can succeed if they strive hard enough. And everyone deserves a second chance.

By trying to be great, “Hustle & Flow” misses its opportunity to be good. Here is a film that, despite its claims to the contrary, is instantly forgettable. We have seen this story a thousand times before. The details have changed, but not enough. Writer-director Craig Brewer attempts a character study, like the great plotless films of yesteryear like “Alfie” or “Five Easy Pieces,” but falls prey to the clichés of contemporary filmmaking, replete with a cynical, climactic shootout near the end. Although it has some nice moments, as a whole it is not nearly good enough.

In many ways, a very silly, disappointing movie. Basically an unfunny rap version of “The Commitments.”

Ben Beard is a film and music critic living in Chicago.

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