In director Craig Brewer’s brilliantly authentic new film, street hustler DJay (Terrence Howard) pays the bills by pimping three whores for $20 tricks on the streets of South Memphis.
Sitting in a car that’s two flat tires away from a junkyard, Popsicle-sucking, bottle-blond Nola (Taryn Manning) invokes a midlife crisis in DJay by accusing him of contributing nothing to the whole “trickin’ ho’s” operation (a reasonable observation, by all indications).
The accusation sets in motion a series of events that ultimately inspire DJay to “accomplish something” by getting his voice heard on the radio. He teams up with an old high-school buddy, Key (Anthony Anderson, proving he can play for more than cheap laughs), and Key’s lanky, white collaborator to bag a demo in time for the impending visit of a locally grown platinum rap artist, Skinny Black (Ludacris, parodying himself).
At first, it might be hard to take seriously a film that uses the words “trickin’” and “bottom ho’s” repeatedly with an almost scary lack of irony — or one in which Anderson rules that while “Beat Dat Bitch” is not really a radio-friendly hook, “Whoop Dat Trick” works perfectly.
So many films address this world with loud, cliché-ridden satire. Visions of Snoop Dogg or Ice Cube puffing on giant Phillies come to mind.
In some ways, Brewer’s film similarly verges on the cartoonish. For example, Key’s wife (the couple lives a legit, middle-class life) is decidedly more sophisticated than DJay’s harem of scantily clad whores, and her awkward encounters with them seem to have been ripped directly from some UPN sitcom.
However, you’ve got to give props to a film in which a song about how hard it is to be a pimp ends up carrying the emotional weight of “Unchained Melody” in the movie “Ghost.” (Taraji P. Henson can be thanked for this. The best of a stellar supporting cast, she offers a touching portrayal of Shug, a downtrodden, pregnant street whore who comes alive only when she’s asked to lay down the chorus on one of DJay’s tracks.)
With the guidance of producer John Singleton (“Boyz n the Hood,” “Poetic Justice”) and a lens that seems to sweat along with the characters in the Southern summer heat, the film literally beats to DJay’s “mode” as he turns his street philosopher’s musing into soul-stirring rhymes. Brewer creates a universe that takes you back to the roots of an art form, proving that gangsta rap and crunk were not always the flashy products of major-label assembly lines and reminding us all — with minimal cheese — that there’s nothing wrong with having a dream.
The director humanizes the musical style by humanizing the lifestyle that spawned it. He shows us — the people buying these CDs — a richly defined world that many of us believe exists only in glossy music videos on MTV2.
