It sure is fascinating, though, to rappers and to filmmakers, both black (like the Hughes brothers, who made the wide-eyed documentary "American Pimp") and white (like Mr. Or, as DJay more pragmatically puts it, "If I can pimp $20 ho's out the back of my Chevy, I can pimp Skinny."īut as every old-school hip-hop fan knows, pimping ain't easy. Surely he will remember where he came from, and give a fellow striver the leg up he needs. In the end, though, it all depends on Skinny.
Their interactions give the movie a rough, boyish humor that undercuts some of the melodrama, and the music they come up with sounds pretty good. Key recruits Shelby (DJ Qualls), a white musician, to lay down the beats, and the three of them hole up in a makeshift backroom studio. He enlists the help of a high school friend, a hard-working family man named Key (Anthony Anderson) who once dreamed of being a producer with his own record label. Brewer takes some stylistic cues.)ĭJay, hearing that Skinny is coming back home for the Fourth of July and convincing himself that they knew each other in the old days, decides that his one shot at fame lies in getting a demo tape of his own material into Skinny's hands. Isaac Hayes's cameo as a bar owner pays tribute to his place both in Memphis musical history and in the tradition of blaxploitation cinema from which Mr. (Ludacris is not the only musical figure to show up in the movie. The film's embodiment of this paradox is not only DJay, but also Skinny Black (played by the real-life rapper Ludacris, aka Chris Bridges), who has risen from peddling homemade tapes at the local drive-in to music-video ubiquity and platinum-selling albums. It depicts - and inhabits - a world in which the only sure determinants of value are money and fame, but that still holds onto sentimental notions of authenticity and regionalism. Perhaps more than it intends to, "Hustle & Flow" illustrates the contradictions and distortions that define contemporary popular culture. It's hard to hate a movie that falls so completely for its own hustle. The film, which he wrote and directed, feels both naïve and cynical, which may turn out to be the key to its success. Brewer's attempt to fuse hip-hop street credibility, art-house cachet and follow-your-dream, triumph-of-the-underdog Hollywood uplift is canny but clumsy. A rough, sticky sense of place - you can almost smell the sweat of Memphis coming off the screen - dresses up a story so conventional that it sometimes verges on self-parody. It's certainly live, with fine performances and a strong soundtrack, including music from the Memphis rappers Al Kapone and Three 6 Mafia, but never quite real. But the rapper lives and dies by the integrity of his flow, which is praiseworthy insofar as it is "live" and "real."Īnd the movie, which scored an audience award and a big-money distribution deal at Sundance, is a volatile mixture of slickness and sincerity, hard-edged naturalism and sheer show-business hokum. The pimp's mode is the hustle, a smooth, manipulative patter designed to separate johns from their money and keep hookers in line.
This tension is summed up in the movie's title, which refers to the language that defines DJay's conflicting professional ambitions. Perhaps this is only fitting, since the movie's hero, a Memphis pimp named DJay (Terrence Howard) who dreams of becoming a rap star, is both cunning and earnest, a scam artist who claims to want nothing more than to speak his mind and lay bare his soul. There is a lot of heart in "Hustle & Flow," Craig Brewer's first feature film, and a lot of nonsense as well.