Everybody Gotta Have a Dream

Rating: 9/10 (22 February 2006)

Think back to the days of the "blaxploitation" film. Now imagine if one of these films had production values, a real budget and a professional crew, all the things a modern Hollywood movie takes for granted. Now imagine the lead is not just a solid actor, but a revelation, so good that he makes every actor around him elevate their game into something mythic. If you had all that, you may just end up with "Hustle & Flow."
The film isn't perfect; D.J. Qualls stumbles in his dramatic scenes, and Anthony Anderson is only good at playing Anthony Anderson. Those two aside, every actor absolutely vanishes into the roles they play (though Taraji Henson as the pregnant Shug does waver back and forth, occasionally overdoing it) and the result is a powerful, real, absolutely watchable film for anyone who just loves a strong, character-driven story. These aren't the cartoons we're used to watching in movies about "the streets"; these are real people, they exist, and anyone who says different has never ventured out of the suburbs.
Despite the problem actors, they do each get at least one moment where they are just as real as those around them. And Terrence Howard is a revelation, though I'm surely not the first person to say it. I didn't see this movie because of the reviews, I saw it because of Howard's performance in "Crash" and the trailer for "Idlewild." He's got a presence, and he lives and breathes this role in a movie that is almost, but not quite up to him, which is exactly like Charlize Theron in "Monster," or Hilary Swank in "Boys Don't Cry," or Denzel Washington in "Training Day." The movies are very good. The actor radiates.
A quarter-century after the death of blaxploitation cinema, the African-American film movement is in a shambles. Spike Lee and John Singleton only have one good movie, each, to their names, and the Hughes Brothers have moved out of black cinema and into a different genre entirely. There are powerful stories to tell about the black culture, about the black experience, and this pulls no punches, telling what could be a true story as if it WERE the truth, because it IS the truth... uplifting in parts, brutally ugly in others.
How proud was I, then, that writer/director Craig Brewer had such an incredible story to tell, and finally, at long last, that culture has a name and a face to do it right in cinema. And then I see an interview with the guy, and he's a middle-aged, bald white cat.
Like D. Jay says, man. Everybody gotta have a dream.