Hustles and flows... sometimes with limited success

Rating: 6/10 (23 April 2006)

The setting is gritty: a pimp and hustler (well-played by Terrence Howard) finds the rapper in himself, and writes a song that will, hopefully, make him famous.
This film isn't like most music films- it is heavily realistic, both in terms of speech (dialect, pacing, accent, vocabulary) and subject matter; at times the movie alienated me (maybe because, deep down inside, the movie was offensive to me). But that is not the fault of the film - I found that it grated me slightly.
The film is explosive and realistic: but to have a dream and live it is universal. I think that's what the movie's trying to say.