Slam

Saul Williams as Ray in Slam

The poetry's the thing in a film driven by hip-hop.

by Cindy Fuchs

Written and directed by Marc Levin

A Trimark Pictures release

Recommended

Writer-director Marc Levin's first feature, Slam, is a hip-hop film. Now, you could say that the term hip-hop covers a lot of ground, including the very good, the not so good and the outright terrible, with some boring, reductive or derivative material at the top of the popularity scale. And you could say that hip-hop is where the action is, politically, aesthetically, and—especially—commercially speaking. Or at least this is the news recently discovered by Warren Beatty and Mariah Carey, as well as demonstrated many, many times over by Puffy and Master P, among other hip-hop moguls. I mean, even MTV is currently showing more so-called hip-hop than not, in its general category countdowns.

So when you hear that Slam is a hip-hop film, you could be worried. And you could be exponentially more worried when you hear that it won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and the Audience Award at Cannes this year, given that film festival viewers have usually seen too many movies in too few days, and so tend to vote for simple and/or heartwarming material, just because they think it moved them. Moreover, I confess I had been warned by friends who had seen it that the thing was ambitious and clichéd, and so I went to the theater with low expectations.

I left feeling that Slam had been both oversold by the festivals (and critics doing back-flips and thumbs-up) and undersold by my friends. Sure, sometimes its striving for hip-hopness is a little too music-video: stop-and-go and slow motions, fast zooms in and out, saturated colors, and lots of internal framing (usually barred windows and door frames). On top of that, it concerns righteously angry characters who use slam poetry as a way to combat legal and social racisms. And you know that such visual hyperactivity and socially conscious subject matter could seem, at first, stereotypical.

This is a movie stuck between several rocks and hard places. Because it considers lives that are both brutally familiar and sensational, it is likely to fascinate (in the sense that urban violence and prison existence are exotic to many viewers) but it isn't what you'd expect, based on what you've seen on TV or in hood movies (the focus is not on the violence, but on strategies to deal with it).

The story is frankly rudimentary. A young black man, Ray Joshua (Saul Williams), sees his friend-and-dealer shot down in front of him, and within minutes he's arrested by DC detectives, charged with holding marijuana. He's hauled off to jail, where he goes through the standard awful indignities. He's advised by his public defender to cop a plea, for which he can get 2-3 years rather than the 10 years he'll get if he loses in court (which he would even if he was innocent, which he's not: then again, innocence is relative). Ray is trapped in every way conceivable: he's young, black, without family and poor, a casualty of the system. In jail, he learns quickly, there are no options about how to live. Inside, violence is banal, terrible and ever-present.

For a few days, Ray survives. When he's confronted by one gang, he's invited to join another. Problem is, he wants no truck with either, and struggles desperately to come up with an alternative where none seems imaginable. The tension mounts. The bullies approach Ray in the yard. The soundtrack (by DJ Spooky) almost screams, eerily scraping and pounding (the CD version features some creative combinations, including a brilliant Goodie Mob-Esthero track). The camera careens to closeups of characters' shifting eyes and pulsing pecs, then circles, pulls out and back. Ray bursts into manic lyrics, offering his words for his life.

This is a hip-hop moment, profound and crazy and wild and dazzling. The other prisoners stare, as Ray speaks, articulating his rage, turning his pain into poetry, reaching out to and rejecting the men around him at the same time. They stand, mouths open, mystified. The audience in the theater with me laughed out loud right then. And it is silly, the image of these iron-pumped hardasses, blown away by a skinny kid in dreads, ranting about freedom and fear.

The moment is a set-up, too, a point where the film lays out its agenda, its strength and weakness, absolutely, even if inadvertently. It illustrates that Slam is most precise and effective when it just gives in to the poetry that is plainly its central interest, and lets go of the contrived plot that might presume to prop it up. The story is secondary, a way to get at the words. The script is credited to Levin, Sohn, Williams, Richard Stratton and hip-hop journalist Bonz Malone, who also plays Ray's jailhouse mentor, a banger who sees the light during the above-mentioned yard scene, and it is played like a conversion experience, a good idea made trivial by its abrupt execution.

Ray undergoes his own conversions, two or three that I counted. These are generated by the film's single girl character (not unbelievable, but trite). He meets a teacher at the jail, Lauren Bell (Sonja Sohn, who is a spectacular first-time actor and luminous slam poet), and after he observes her teaching Monster (the incredible autobiography by Sanyika Shakur: you should read it), it's clear they'll get together, based on their affinity for poetry (I suppose there are worse reasons, like those usually concocted in movie romances).

Ray and Lauren are more like vehicles for poetry than developed personalities, like singers evoking a specific time and place by their tone, rhythm and energy. They don't act like other cinematic couples. They don't actually spend much time together. Instead, the film is full of visual metaphors, Levin and cinematographer Mark Benjamin conveying with lights, angles and props what dialogue might have, in another film: the camera looking at Ray from behind, in silhouette and pierced through with sparkles of sunlight as he stands at water's edge at sundown, or the camera tilting up from the base of the immense and implacable Washington Monument, white and huge and overwhelming, the sign of all legal and other offenses and oppressions facing Ray no matter what his decision.

Lauren and Ray do fight over this decision—should he cop and do the time, run away, fight in some other way?—and it's their single extended exchange. A handheld camera and few cuts make the tension between them palpable. The camera is always just a beat behind their movements, like a Snoop-style rapper. Meanwhile, the soundtrack music gets out of the way and their words fly and flail: language can't capture their frustration and fury, mutual and opposed. The performances here are grand—lots of hollering and gesticulating—not formal poetry but the raw stuff behind it.

When Ray and Lauren (or more to the point, Williams and Sohn) do perform on stage near the end of the film, their riffs are tremendous. And by this time you know that it's not the setting or the plot or even the anger that makes Slam hip-hop. It's the single moments, the bodies and the words.