With apologies to Michael Moore, one can be a "stupid white man" and still like this movie....

Rating: Null/10 (7 August 2005)

To quote from the Cramps' anthemic cover of the 1950's hit "Rocket in my Pocket": "Well I don't know about art but I know what I like." I sure don't know much about Rap/Hip-Hop/Krump/Crunk/whatever, but I know a nice little well-told story when I see one. I'll admit "Hustle & Flow" had not exactly been high on my must-see list but this past Saturday I really wanted to go to a movie; since I don't live in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles, what was available was stuff I'd either seen or didn't care to see. Then I thought "Well hell, let's give this a shot." Proved to be a good decision on my part.
We're introduced to a somewhat unassuming-looking black guy in his mid-to-late-30's sitting in his vintage car smoking a cigarette as he lays out some down-home philosophy (which gets tellingly repeated near the end) to an unseen character who then is revealed as a young strung-out-looking white chick. If we hadn't known in advance, we needn't have been Einstein to grasp that she's a prostitute and he's her pimp. Eventually a customer pulls up; when the pimp's initial sales pitch fails to sink in, he exasperatedly tells his "ho" to (paraphrasing somewhat) "explain to this gentleman how this situation should proceed." She gets into the john's car and off they go as the pimp sits and watches and smokes. I don't know how the pimp knows that the client is not some psycho who wants to murder his employee. I suppose one develops a "sixth sense" for that sort of thing.
The pimp is played by Terrence Howard, about whose performance even haters of the move have been raving. I kept wondering where the heck I'd seen this guy before---turned out he'd been in "Crash" which I'd seen relatively recently, as a completely different kind of character. As the pimp he's rock solid, never hits a wrong note, a guy born on the wrong side of the wrong tracks suffering from being just intelligent enough to know what a waste his life has been thus far. He sucks on those cigarettes like an oxygen tube. He's followed the "path of least resistance" to become a pimp, has three in his "stable" under his roof; one of them has an infant son, plus another one is pregnant; it's all he can do to keep them all and himself more or less functioning. I doubt I've ever seen a pimp portrayed this realistically in a movie before. I've known plenty of managers in "legitimate" jobs who didn't remotely have the level of "people skills" needed here.
He takes possession of a Casio mini-keyboard which in the movie's best scene he uses to pacify the squalling son of one of his hookers. This gets him thinking about a music career like that of one "Skinny Black," a Memphis "homeboy" he may or may not have known once. He enlists the help of a childhood chum to concoct a recording studio in his home with egg crates stapled to the walls for sound-proofing; they have to turn the fan off to record and (in the second best scene) the pimp has to go placate his hostile neighbor (using marijuana, apparently the universal medium of exchange) whose music is seeping into their recording session. There's a nice atmosphere in all this of "real" people giving it their all to break into a tough business, hinting back to those "Let's put on a show in the barn!" epics from the 1930's. I couldn't begin to say if the music they eventually record is "good" or "bad" by the standards of that genre, but they sure put a lot of heart into it. The bashful stammering pregnant woman who gets dragooned into being a backup singer and who blossoms with each "take" is an absolute joy to watch. She alone was enough to make me believe this really was the South.
Unfortunately it gets a little formulaic towards the end with the requisite violence which we know in advance won't lead to death because at that point too much time has been invested for such a drastic departure. The "somewhat happy" ending seems just a little contrived. But it's all played with absolute conviction & I for one was perfectly happy to "buy into" it. Not since my 1990's favorites "Smoke Signals" and "Ulee's Gold" has a movie made such an appealingly "human" impression on me. It may be the first movie this year since "Kung Fu Hustle" that I see twice.
Towards the end the pimp tells his friend that if the new baby of a prostitute and an unknown john ever asks him if she could be President, "I'll look her in the eye and lie to her.'cause sometimes that's what you gotta do." Damn, that was poignant. Some day, I reckon, there'll be a black President, and a female President, maybe even both at once; it'd be kinda cool if I could live to see that.
The part of the church-going somewhat-happily-married sound engineer must have been a cakewalk for Anthony Anderson after his turn as the demonic drug lord on the best cop show on TV, i.e. "The Shield." This guy has a genuinely approachable "everyman" quality; I predict he'll have the next long-running "mainstream" sitcom after that of Bill Cosby and Will Smith.....